What Thunder Means Before It Rains
by uiftrue
Summary: Prim and proper Francesca Wilson is newly relocated to the reclusive Quileute Reservation of La Push. All she really wants to do is see the sights and make some friends. She certainly did not factor in being the imprint of a temperamental, hotheaded werewolf who challenges everything she believes in. Paul/OC imprint story.
1. Chapter 1

When I was in Grade 4, my favourite teacher - and, now I thought about it, my potential future self - remarked that anything was possible if you planned for it.

I was in _emphatic_ agreement, and, arguably, modelled my life around it. Leave no stone unturned and all that. In the past, I'd been tagged a 'Type B' personality, 'anally retentive', and had, on a number of occasions, been instructed to do everything from 'Christ, would you give the to-do lists a fucking _rest?'_ to 'lighten the fuck up, love'.

I could, if pressed, see where the aforementioned naysayers got their inspiration. In my experience, other people seemed to think of life as this big, awesome thing meant to overwhelm, terrify, and excite. Much as you might feel if you took a cruise in a canoe down a waterfall. Life, other people seemed to think, was supposed to be this awe-inspiring ride where you never knew what was going to happen. I had no qualms with this view. I imagined it was liberating. That said, it wasn't _my_ view. To me, life could be described akin to a...I don't know, a lion in a circus (presupposing the circus was ethical, of course). The lion (life) itself is a volatile creature, yes, but it was a creature that can be tamed with training, structure, and rules. Without the aforementioned regulations, it could just run off and destroy everything, potentially hurting you irrevocably.

I enjoyed the tamed life.

That was why I stood now, in my room, checking off a list of items that were definitely in my backpack, namely post-it notes (a Francesca Wilson staple), a stapler, a hole puncher, a mini sellotape, coloured pens and pencils (fine only), and a bunch of treasury tags. Basic, yes, but my first day at La Push High warranted only a few basic items. Afterwards, I'd be able to gauge what sort of items I'd need to bring in an average day. Hopefully, the high school weren't too big on worksheets, because a) the environment (self-explanatory) and b) I liked all my work to be restricted to the coordinating exercise book. Flyaway sheets are just messy.

"Hurry up, Frankie, or you'll be late!"

"Ha ha, very funny," I said monotonously. My father knew full well that I was about as likely to be late for...well, _anything_ , as the Cassius Gardenia had of appearing in the middle of this November! Statistically possible, yes, but everyone knew it wasn't gonna happen. "Hey, dad, do we have any of those cereal bars with the chocolate chips left?"

"If you're quick! And I hope that's not all you're planning to have for breakfast, young lady."

"I'm having some OJ, too," I said once I was down in the kitchen. I said 'kitchen' but it could hardly be classified as that. Pale oak cupboards in a C-shape and one of those fancy silver refrigerators with an inbuilt water dispenser showed some truly lovely potential, but all that lovely potential was obscured by the boxes upon boxes stacked everywhere. "You need to eat something, too, father dearest. You've got a long day of unpacking ahead.

My father grimaced. "Don't remind me. I know you'll be tired when you're back from school but I'd appreciate the extra pair of hands getting all of this packed and put away. Then we can sit back and relax afterwards. Maybe whack out a celebratory tub of ice cream."

"Of course, daddy. I'm hardly going to sit back while you do all the work. Besides, I meant to ask you to leave the hallway and bedroom stuff to me. You do the kitchen, but I want creative control over our bedroom and the lounge."

"I should have known this move across the country is the perfect opportunity for you to unleash Francesca The Interior Designer in her glorious fullness. What are your plans? You have my OK for anything but _not_ cream walls, OK?"

"But Dad!" I protested. "A really rich magnolia is the perfect basic canvas. Why can't we let our possessions do the talking for us? What about that really cool elephant rug Auntie Jean got me from India? Stuff like that, statement pieces, honestly speak way more volumes than, say, a lick of magenta on the walls."

"This is a definitive no, honey. I left my parents' house at sixteen with barely anything, but one thing I did take with me was a steadfast refusal to be in any way, shape or form like them. And the inside of my house growing up? Cream walls, everywhere, and my dad was so stingy about anyone touching 'em or leaning on them or breathing near them. Anything that could potentially ruin them.. I did not buy this house in a roundabout Freudian wish to live back there again.."

"Oh please, you're telling me a lick of magnolia is all it takes for the flashbacks to start?" At the stubborn set of his jaw, I rolled my eyes. "OK, fine. No cream walls. How about a subtle lime shade?"

"Sounds good as long as it doesn't look like puke. Anyway, how you feeling about today?"

Shrugging, I pushed a slice of wholemeal bread into the toaster. "Fine. I was trying to find the La Push High societies database earlier but there was nothing. With the Quillayute River on everyone's doorstep, you'd really think there'd at least be an established kayaking society or something."

I was the sort of person who asked where we were going out for dinner so that I could Google the reviews and menu beforehand. It wasn't that I _needed_ to know everything, it's just that I felt much more comfortable when all variables were face up on the table.. So when I'd found out that the location of my dad and mine's new humble abode fell into the very slim Quileute Tribal High School catchment area, I'd immediately utilised all the forces that be - read: Google - to research my new school in great depth and detail. You could call me a Quileute Tribal High expert. All I needed to do now was, you know, actually go.

"There's whale watching," my dad offered. "Saw quite a few signs for it on the drive up here. Have a go at that, you never know. Try something new."

"I guess so, but I don't know how popular it'll be with people my age." Something I didn't voice to my father but which I'm sure he'd gauged anyway was that I was _so_ determined to make friends. Back in Topeka, I really only had one friend, and he was my absolute bestfriend. But I didn't really have, just, you know, regular friends to hang out with. I didn't even have acquaintances. I knew it was my fault: my standards were too high and I tended to hold a grudge. It's an absolute disaster of a recipe in high school, and a guarantee of no-friendom.

And now I had the chance to do it all again, to do it _right_. I'd be a fool to mess things up again. Hence the frantic school societies search. I wanted friends, and I wanted them pouring in from all avenues.

"Speaking of which," my father said. "The folk here are pretty...to themselves, I've heard. Suspicious of 'outsiders'." My father made little quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

"Have you been reading TripAdvisor reviews again?" I joked.

"You're white," my father said bluntly, "and are attending a school that is _for_ the Quileute tribe, where 99% of folk will be Native American. I just want you to be careful not to step on any toes."

"I will be careful." I fiddled with the charm on my bracelet. "Besides, it's not like they don't have a reason to be, you know, cautious. History has not been kind to the Native Americans."

"I didn't say they were wrong to be suspicious, but you're the one who's my daughter. I just want you to have a good time, alright?"

I had to smile at that. "Alright."

* * *

"Kaheleha was the first of the Quileute people to defend La Push from incomers who tried to covet the land for themselves. Legend has it that Kalheleha used the magic running through the blood of the Quileute people to defend it..."

I sat in my first period class, attention rapt. This was without a doubt the most interesting Religious Education class I'd ever received, and maybe it meant something that it was about Native American, specifically Quileute, history. I had arrived for the class ten minutes early (a Francesca Wilson standard, that) whereupon there'd only been one other student and the teacher populating the class.

The teacher was called Mr. Burke, and if he was surprised to see that his new student was white, he did not show it.

"Francesca, we're currently discussing a figure named Kaheleha. He plays a very central role in the religious education curriculum, so you should try to centre your studies around Kaheleha and try to understand all that you're subsequently taught within context of him. I always tell my students to pay attention to the progression and development of the stories I tell. Notice the change. It will be important."

I nodded, eager to absorb every word. "I'll make a note of that. I'm really excited to learn," I said earnestly.

The side of his mouth quirked up ever so slightly. "Nice to hear. If you feel overwhelmed by information or feeling sketchy about things, talk to me after class."

Then chatty students filtered in, I played with the edges of my fresh, clean lined paper nervously, and Mr. Burke began teaching. When he taught, he spoke in a clear, confident voice with one hand casually tucked into his slacks. His eyes were dark and direct, with posture so upright and regal my old ballet teacher would have swooned.

God, I loved confident men. However, I was also a sucker for nerds, and the intersection for that Venn diagram is very slim indeed. Mr. Burke had just the right nerdy-confidence combo; you could tell he felt passionately about his subject.

Mr. Burke paused in his speech and looked around at the class. "Anyone confused about anything thus far and need it cleared up?" To his credit, his gaze didn't dwell on me. "No? OK. I'm going to pass round this worksheet. Take one each. On one side you'll see two familiar figures and on the other side two more familiar figures. I want you to write down everything you know about all four so far."

Drat. First period and already a worksheet? I hope this wasn't going to set a precedent.

"Do you need some help?" A soft voice beside me asked.

To my left, a girl with a beautiful, black sheet of hair hanging over one shoulder, and the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen, was smiling at me shyly.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, excited and grateful at the same time. Could this be it?! My first friend at La Push High? "I'd love some. Thank you! What's your name?"

"I'm Kim," she said, twiddling a pen between her fingers in what I could only describe as a nervous manner. "What's yours?"

"I'm Francesca." As I smiled at her, I saw something that I thought was a blush rising on her cheeks. I was surprised I could see it on skin so dark.

"So," I said, scrambling for something to say. "Have you...have you always gone to school here?"

Lame. I inwardly winced at my blatant attempt to make small talk. Lame, lame, lame.

Kim nodded. "I've gone to school here since kindergarten."

I blinked, impressed. "Wow. Is that - is that normal?"

Even as I realised my social faux pas, I was too busy being surprised at the snort of laughter that left the mouth of the girl I'd known all of five minutes. "I don't know what 'normal' is, but it's pretty standard on the rez, yeah. Born here, grow up here…"

"And stay here," I supplied, and then began to worry my lip. Could that have been construed as rude?

That said, while I was worried about my potential lack of social skills, the innate nerd in me was getting restless. Time was ticking, and the blasted worksheet before me was still blank.

Kim seemed to be thinking the same thing. Sitting up straighter, she asked, "So, ever heard of Q'wati?"

Kim was nice. I liked her a lot. These were the thoughts that swirled around my head as the two of us walked to lunch together about two hours after I'd first met her. Kim had been an angel as we were walking from R.E and asked if I wanted to sit with her at lunch, which was after second period. My 'yes!' was quicker than the dart of a goldfish, embarrassingly enough.

But there was something that confused me about her. While it was lovely of her to take little old me under her wing, I kept thinking, the more our conversations went on, that she really just didn't seem like the sort of girl to just turn around and talk to someone she'd never spoken to before. Kim was shy. Really shy. The most I counted was four seconds of eye contact before her eyes skittered away from mine to rest in their favourite place: her lap. Whenever I asked her a question, or said anything that required some sort of personal input or thought, her second-guessing of herself was almost audible; her mouth would open, and then shut, and then open, and then shut again. And then when she finally said something, it was in this voice so suffused with self-consciousness that it was actually painful to listen to. Yes, she was a nice girl, but it wasn't an understatement to say that I felt bad for talking to her because I felt like I was too taxing on her own self-comfort.

As we walked to lunch together, side by side, I tried to level the playing field a little. "I'm really happy I got talking to you," I said earnestly, as we walked through the courtyard. I watched a small bird pecking at the inside of a flower flutter up and away at the merest gust of wind. "I was pretty nervous. I still am, really. I'm really paranoid I won't make any friends."

"I like talking to you," Kim said quietly, a small but genuine smile on her mouth. "You shouldn't have any problems with anyone else."

"You think so? I...I guess I was worried that...I don't know. I've heard that the people in and around La Push parts keep to themselves mainly."

"You mean people on the reservation?"

I flushed at my poorly disguised transparency which Kim had swiped away with no issue at all. "Well - yes," I said lamely, my stomach fluttering with real nervous butterflies. "I - obviously I don't mean to be rude or forward, it's just I - obviously I know I'm different from everyone else here and I've heard that some people don't - don't like that. Obviously I can understand why and I don't blame anybody, I just…"

I trailed off. When I got started on one of these flustered tangents I was occasionally prone to, I normally relied on the interjecting powers of the other person I was letting loose on. Curse Kim's shyness for not being able to save me from myself.

"Some people are more cautious than others," Kim said finally, still not looking at me, using the word I'd used earlier to defend the attitudes of the Quileute people to my father. "And I don't think you're different from everyone else."

I rolled my eyes. "You know what I mean." _My paleness, duh._

The slightest quirk of her lips was the only indication that she did, in fact, know what I mean.

"This is really nice," I said after I'd swallowed a mouthful of frybread, a Native American concoction that was all golden and warm. "Like, _really_ nice. I've never had Native American cuisine before, in any capacity really."

Kim herself was having at her ceviche, a seafood-based dish with generous lashings of lemon and lime. She politely swallowed her mouthful of food before asking, "What did you eat back in Kansas?"

"There were regular lunch staples there like pizza, French fries...you know, standard American diet." I rolled my eyes.

"How come you didn't get any of this?" asked my tentative new friend, nodding towards her own dish.

"I'm veggie," I explained. "Nevermind, though. I really like this frybread stuff."

"Oh, you're a vegetarian?" Kim's voice was tinged with surprise. "That's cool. I...I don't think I've ever met one in person before."

Now it was my turn to be surprised. "Really? Never met a vegetarian before? I mean, I can understand if I was vegan, but veggie?"

"I guess meat-eating is just the norm here," Kim explained. "More so than anywhere else. Native American food is...well, inescapably meaty, I suppose. It's even in the broth."

"I see," I said, marveling at the fact that this was probably the most substantial thing Kim had said in our short half-a-day-long friendship. "That's fair enough."

"So what made you want to go vegetarian, then?"

But I never got to answer, because at that moment a trio of girls walked past our table, the one in the middle turning to call over her shoulder, "Hi, _Kim_ ," in a voice so contemptuous I actually blinked.

"Who...were they?" I asked, gaze lingering over the three receding figures.

Looking back to Kim, I saw that she was steadfastly staring into her lap, and had put down her fork. She seemed to be biting her lip hard.

I knew that I only bit my lip whenever I was worried or upset about something

"They're my...they _were_ my friends." Her voice was feather-soft, wind-soft. So soft I had to lean in and listen hard to catch it.

"Were?" I said gently. "Are you alright? They didn't seem very friendly."

For a long time, Kim didn't answer. Though she looked down, it was impossible to miss the two spots of deep, embarrassed red on her cheeks.

"They can be friendly," she whispered. "If you're friends with them."

I looked after the three girls, who were now perched at least four cafeteria tables away from us, looking as carefree as anything. It made me angry that they had the capability to make my new friend so powerfully sad and embarrassed, when she really seemed like the sweetest girl in the world. Kim wouldn't hurt a fly, and honestly I struggled formulating a reason why they could be treating her this way.

I didn't need to try to formulate an appropriate response, however, because when my eyes flicked back to Kim, there was a guy behind her who was, honest to God, built like a brick shithouse. That's how my dad would have phrased it.

"Kim," the nameless guy said, bending down to take her face into his hands. Before he did, I saw the sadness and embarrassment that had played star roles on Kim's face just moments before wiped clean to be replaced with something else - pure, unadulterated joy.

I blushed and gobbled up more frybread, happy to be in a crowded cafeteria where the hustle-and-bustle (partially) blocked out the sound of kissing.

"What's wrong?" that same, deep voice asked Kim, a sense of urgency rising to the surface of his voice.

A backpack thrown onto the floor next to me startled me out of thoughts of third-wheeling, and I looked to my right to see a guy of similar physique to the one with eyes only for Kim. That wasn't the only thing that was similar about the two men, though. They shared a similar expression, one that I found difficult to articulate. If I was pushed, I'd say I saw a combination of guardedness and mistrust on the faces of these two boys I'd never seen before - though really, they didn't look like boys at all. They looked like men on the ripe side of their 20s.

But that wasn't _it._ That wasn't what I found so hard to articulate about whatever I saw there. I thought I saw something...lurking there. Expectant, waiting, cautious. Almost as though the two of them were waiting for something to go wrong, and in fact were preparing for it.

It made me a little sad.

"Who are you?" the guy to my right asked bluntly, pushing a tray that was honest to God _heaped_ with food onto the table in a careless manner.

"I'm Francesca." I smiled. Though I felt intimidated, I knew that such emotion were pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. At the end of the day, I was an eighteen year old girl and this was an eighteen year old boy, and I'm sure if I were totally up our differences and similarities, the differences would be a little pea compared to the wealth of marks on the similarities side. "What's your name?"

"Jacob. And you're in my seat."

"It is not your seat," Kim argued from the other side of me. She craned her head around me so she could fix Jacob with an unhappy look. "Don't be so mean, Jacob."

Ignoring how stunned I was that Kim was capable of being mad at someone, even if it was to a really lukewarm degree, I said, "I apologise. I didn't know this was your seat. Did you want to swap?"

A snort of derision was all I got in response before the mardy-looking Quileute boy shoved a gob of frybread into his mouth. He stared at me as he chewed. He stared at me as he swallowed.

"No."

Well, okay then. "Okay, then."

"Ignore him, please, Francesca." When I turned to look at Kim, I found a faint trace of panic in her gaze, as though she was worried I'd taken Jacob's moodiness as a personal slight. "He's always like this when he's, uh, hungry."

"Hangry," I said. "We all get like that sometimes."

"Also, Francesca, this is my boyfriend, Jared," she said, referencing the guy who was now sitting on the other side of her, opposite me. The way Kim said those words - 'my boyfriend - with a heavy dose of self-consciousness - heavy, even, for Kim - and with a blush rising on her cheeks, made me think the two of them being together was a recent thing, maybe. "Jared, Francesca."

"Nice to meet you," I said politely.

"And you."

"Francesca's from Kansas," Kim said brightly to the table at large, obviously scrambling for something to say. "Aren't you, Francesca?"

"I am," I said. "I-"

"You seen tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee yet?" Jacob cut over me with a sneer, his gaze trained somewhere in the distance. "Tell me, Kim, are they actually friends, or is their idea of friendship taking selfies constantly throughout lunch?"

Through a combination of following Jacob's gaze and inference, I gathered that the girls he was talking about so contemptuously were the ones who had passed us before, who had sneered at Kim.

"There's nothing wrong with taking selfies," Kim said diplomatically. "People are allowed to like whatever they like."

"Yeah, and I'm allowed my own opinions about those likes. Come on, admit it, all they do is sit there and pout and take photos of themselves. I mean, can you classify that as a hobby?" Jacob looked to Jared. "Is it? Is that a real hobby?"

"It's a fucking stupid hobby," Jared replied, his own gaze flicking over to the two girls', whose backs were facing us and so could not see the mob forming on our table.

Kim began desperately, "Can we please just-"

"Have you been filled in?" Jacob looked at me.

"Um, no, I don't think I-"

"Those two, over there. Cornrows, and purple backpack." The identity of the unpopular twosome were confirmed as the girls who'd sneered at Kim earlier. "Dickheads, the pair of them. Don't talk to them."

"They are _not_ -"

"Give it a rest, Kim," Jacob interrupted. "They're foul creatures and you know it. You might be the sweetest person ever but even you have to admit it. You just have to."

Kim cast an imploring look at Jared, the latter of whom fixed a steely stare on Jacob. "Leave it, Jacob."

"I'm just saying-"

" _Leave it."_

Jacob threw a reproachful look at Jared and moodily shoved a forkful of something into his mouth.

Well, okay, then.

* * *

"Dad, I think I'm gonna go on a little explore now the rain's died down. You need anything from the shop?"

"No thanks, sweetheart. Have fun, and be safe!"

"I will! Love you!"

Being outside after the downpour, I felt the expiry of the rush in the air, that curious stillness. I breathed out and zipped my khaki parks up to the neck, watching as the bruise-coloured clouds above my head opened themselves up before my eyes, sharp beams of light forcing themselves through.

In line with the commencing sunniness, something inside of me, location inarticulable, was beginning to lighten and warm up as well. I felt...content. My belly was full of earlier's dinner concoction: veggie stroganoff. I had had a pretty good first day at Quileute Tribal High even though I'd had secret fears I would be excluded and nobody would like me. And now, I was in my favourite place in the world: outside.

Back in Topeka, I'd easily gobbled up the arguably very gentle and tame hiking trails that Kansas had to offer; afterall, it hadn't earned the description 'flatter than a pancake' for nothing. And, as a largely flat state, it didn't have a lot to offer a girl with a heart in the shape of Mount Everest. It was an absolute dream of mine to ultimately be able to climb the most challenging ascent on earth. Something about pushing yourself to the absolute max, pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone, conquering something you'd always been convinced you couldn't. It took being in control to a whole new level, and I loved that.

Autumn was a loud voice in the sky as I jumped the fence that separated the main road from the country road commencement. I squinted the sun out of my eyes as bright gold hands of light painted the brush I pushed aside the happiest shade of green on earth. Then the bush moved back into place behind me as I entered the forest, and I was cocooned in a tunnel of dimness and coolness. As my hiking boots crunched on the leaves underfoot, I turned my head in vain and tried to seek out the cicadas who were singing loud and with abandon. When I was little and my dad would take me on baby trails, I used to pretend that the cicadas were trying to tell us secrets, and I would close my eyes, breathe in, and imagine what sort of things they'd confide in me.

As it was my first bushwhacking expedition in La Push, I'd brought along a regional map, but I held it between my hands in a reluctant way as I walked along. I didn't really like bringing along maps while hiking. Sure, I understood that it had a purpose and a function, and it was indeed much safer to always keep a map hands, but I felt ridiculous carrying around a 2D signifier of the world around me when I could just...look around me. My favourite park of hiking was the sense of exploration.

That was why, as I came to the end of the footpath through the forest, I folded the map back up again and zipped it away in my rucksack. My pace quickened in excitement, and the only sound before I emerged from the mouth of the forest was the steady puff of my own breathing, and the squawk of birds in the obscurity of the trees.

And there it was. First Beach.

It was about 8:15pm, and the back of the sea roared to itself in massive, turbulent, unreasonable waves before flattening with relief as they melted against the sand, becoming nearly nothing but wet scope along the sand before rearing back and doing it all again. The sky was _alive -_ golden, and roaring, beginning with the stone of the sun deep in the sky, illuminating everything around me with the most beautiful deep yellow hue all I could do was stand there and be amazed. To my left, a seastack stood supporting birds dancing on the surface of it.

I walked forwards slowly. The wind whipped against my cheeks and my eyes watered instinctively. I cast a look around me, but I was the only figure in sight. I slipped off my shoes, and then my socks, and stepped with bare feet onto the sand, wriggling my toes. After bending down to roll up my cargo pants, I slowly walked towards the shore. The water rolled towards me and swarmed past my feet and I watched as the foam at the mouth of the waves dissolved into a calm, quiet nothing. I shut my eyes and felt the ocean in its uninhibited fullness, all around me.

Like this, I felt so small.

I don't know how long I stayed there. Maybe an hour, maybe two. All I knew was that a howl tore through the otherwise calm surrounding of the sea, and when I whipped my head around, thinking, " _did I really just hear…?"_ the only lightness in the sky was deep in the horizon and as slim as a crescent moon. My watch read 10:02pm. Shit! How had I lost track of time so badly? I'd told dad I'd be back no later than 9!

The dark thicket crunched and crackled as I ran through the dark-obscured footpath, and where before the cicadas sand a pleasant, familiar song, now the owls twitted above me where I couldn't see them, and the sound seemed full of foreboding and the promise of something that belonged exclusively to the night.

Could that really have been the howl of a wolf I'd heard? A _wolf?_ In La Push? The significant amount of research I'd done about the area my father and I now called our home hadn't yielded _anything_ about wolves. Maybe it wasn't a wolf I'd heard. Maybe it was some creature native to the area that sounded like a wolf but was actually…

As though the mystery of La Push could hear my thoughts, I heard another howl. Loud and undeniable. Aggressive. Heart pounding, I amped up my frantic walk to a run.

I didn't stop running until I reached home.

* * *

What do you guys think? Are you intrigued, bored, excited, confused? Do you want to read more? Please tell me because I would love to know! Much love to you.


	2. Chapter 2

A few birthdays ago, my father had gotten me a glossy, pamphlet-style book of 'untranslatable' German words as one of a few side gifts. The main gift had been a bike, but dad liked it when I had more than one present to open, perhaps because we were each other's onlys and had to compensate. Consequently, we were both very generous with each other when it came to birthdays and Christmases.

The book was black and beautiful, with the German word, its translation, and definition on the right, and a picture to illustrate the word on the left page. One of the words that had stuck with me, and I remembered it even now, years later, was 'fernweh'. Fernweh is the opposite of homesickness, and describes the feeling of needing to get away, and to explore other places. Back in Topeka, Kansas, I had dreamed about my father getting a new job halfway across the world, somewhere exotic, somewhere happy, somewhere that was called something no one had ever heard of, and just leaving it all behind.

It wasn't that I wasn't happy in Topeka. All considered, I thought I could come to the reasonable conclusion that I was a simple girl and I didn't need a lot to be happy. So it wasn't that, it wasn't Topeka, it wasn't the place itself. It was just that...I don't know, I guess I was a restless person. I was that girl who wanted to know the why, how, when and where before everybody else. I was the girl who asked questions. I was the girl who liked to hike. I always wanted to go that bit further, to know and understand completely, to explore limitlessly. And in Topeka, the little slice of the world I happened to have been born in, I was reminded everyday of what was missing.

It wasn't a bad place to live, but then again it wasn't a good place to live, not in my opinion, anyway. I grew up in a downtown area of Topeka called Charlesbridge, a town-suburb hybrid which was about as riveting as a bag of frozen peas. Growing up there, I'd felt that my environment was in a strange state of purgatory, with nothing particularly distinguishable or exciting going on around me, as if the commerce, leisure, hell, even the people, were stuck in this unsatisfying sense of inhibitedness. My observations were rather cruel, yes, but they were just what I had observed.

Now, I pinned the branches away from my body, treading on brush, as I sidled my way through the forest that bordered my new house in La Push. I tasted that word in my house. Fernweh. The trees were mighty above me, the cicadas well and chirping and alive as I wondered if this was the place my daydreams had envisioned my father and I escaping to, like birds slipping through the bored, rusty hands of a cage. Now that I was here - away, just away from everything I'd ever known, like I'd always wanted - did I feel satisfied? Was La Push what I had expected? Was I...fulfilled?

There was still plenty time yet - afterall, I'd only been in La Push for a week - but my first impressions were positive. School: on top of everything, and I found the lessons immensely interesting - check. Friends: sort of check. Home: small but spacious, and growing ever more beautiful due to the fact that my father was allowing me to exercise pretty much full creative control over the decor. So I guess things at La Push were going pretty good.

That said, I had had to wrangle with my father a bit to let him to come out here hiking alone. As I squinted up at the sky, which reflected 8pm autumn rather well with a chilly, fast dimming blue concentrating in vivid ochre closest to the ground, I thought back to the conversation I'd had with my father just this morning.

 _"Dad?"_

 _"What's up, honey?"_

 _I hesitated. "Are there...wolves in La Push?"_

 _My father stared. I smiled awkwardly._

 _"Not to my knowledge," he said slowly, an inflection in his tone which I interpreted as saying, 'daughter of mine, have you gone bonkers?' "Why do you ask?'_

 _"Well…" I slid the lid back on the marmalade jar and swirled it shut tight. Dare I tell my father that I thought I'd heard the howl of a wolf last night during my hike to First Beach? It wasn't that I was afraid at the prospect of telling my father or ar the possibility of wolves roaming around La Push - more that I was worried he'd think twice about letting me go on one of my hikes late at night._

 _"I dunno. I just thought I heard something last night when I was hiking to First Beach. I mean, it's probably nothing, but I just thought I'd ask."_

 _"And you thought it was a wolf?"_

 _I couldn't really decipher the precise flavour of the emotion in my dad's voice - paternal concern? Mystification? A combination of both?_

 _"It just sounded like one, that's all. But I mean, it could have been, like...a fox." I did not tell my father that after my frightening episode in the woods, I'd gone straight to my room, pulled out my ageing laptop, and Google searched 'what other animals howl?' The results had been sparse, the articles rendered clearly grasping at straws, but I had come away with the knowledge that foxes howled sometimes to indicate their presence in the woods to other foxes, or just to attract attention. "I've heard foxes do it sometimes as an attention-seeking behaviour."_

 _"Oh, really?"_

 _"Uh-huh."_

 _"Well, it's all good and well to speculate, but you need to be certain about what's in those woods before I let you wander back inside."_

 _I nodded. "I know, daddy. I'm already on it, anyway. Kim's lived in this area her whole klife so I'll just ask her. Anyway, I stuck to the official hiking trail they mention in all the maps, so it has to be safe!"_

 _"That better be the case, because I've only got one daughter, and I'd prefer it if she was kept in one piece."_

Now, I paused in my steps to catch my breath and have a thorough look around me. All around me were thick, intertwining trees and vegetation that, apart from my own, was completely untouched. The trees recovering from autumn meant the vibrant green all around me looked particularly fresh and new, and I could smell the chlorophyll with no trouble at all. It was my favourite smell; that fresh, green, natural smell. I shut my eyes briefly, allowing myself to feel like a small creature in the thicket - which, I suppose, I was - before opening them again, breathing in deeply, and continuing on my way.

This time, I didn't have a destination. Not really. When I'd set out from my house about forty minutes earlier, my aim had been only to explore. I was in the woods where I'd followed the trail to First Beach, but this time I had taken a right where last time I'd taken a left, which a quick perusal of the map back at home had promised would lead to a pretty water feature named Norman's Lake (it wasn't really a lake) that, after a further Google search, apparently wasn't actually that popular of an attraction and so not very populated. Perfect.

I squinted at my surroundings. Huh. I thought I remembered the map saying something about seeing a red arrow marked on a tree roundabout now. I did a full twirl, and then again, to ensure that I wasn't just being blind. Nope. Maybe it was further down…

But as I hiked further up, my breath and the crunch of leaves underfoot the only real music in the woods, I still couldn't see any red arrow. I cast a glance over my shoulder, mentally marked my surroundings to ensure I recognise the route back, and trudged on further.

I slowed. Was that..? It was! The faint trickle of water was easy to hear in the otherwise quiet, dark air. I moved forwards eagerly, breathless not just from the energy I was expending, but excitement, too. I was nearly there! I was nearly at Norman's Lake! And I hadn't seen the red arrow that indicated it, but nevermind - perhaps it had presented itself before, and I'd missed it because I hadn't been expecting it.

As I walked, the rushing sound of water became clearer and clearer, and the trees grew sparser as I moved on until eventually they had completely receded into grass.

The step from woodland brush to soft grass is pleasant.

When I look around at my new surroundings, I gasp.

* * *

P.E. was, without a doubt, the class I was most looking forward to at La Push. That Friday morning was my first scheduled P.E. class, and though I had not yet met anyone who I could walk to class with, I thumbed the straps of my P.E. bag excitedly, wondering who I'd meet this class.

I walked to the inside gym alone, aware of the stares and lingering glances I received, but paying no mind. It was my third day at Quileute Tribal High, and while I knew that I looked, well, different, to mostly everyone else, it was difficult to feed such logic to your instinctual feelings of self-consciousness. While I still held my head high - unlike Kim, I was not fond of the 'head duck' - I couldn't quite stifle the way my posture and face immediately relaxed, a consequence of having been told that I walk very 'primly' and also, apparently, have a resting bitch face. I was trying to attract potential friends here, not having them run away from me aflutter like pigeons when you step too close. I was still wearing my affected relaxed smile, the one that said 'I promise I am a nice person with a lot of good qualities, if only you'd take the initiative and approach me, because I am much too intimidated to approach you' face when I pushed open the double doors to the wide open, echo-y space of the inside gym.

I was early, as always, so I took a seat on the assembly bench and waited for people to filter in.

Rather awkwardly, one of the girls who had behaved so contemptuously towards Kim - whom Jacob had referred to as either 'tweedle-dum' or 'tweedle-dee' - turned out to be in my PE class. And she most definitely recognised me, if her not so covert glance at my face and subsequent whispering to a gaggle of girls I didn't recognise was any indication.

It didn't bother me in the slightest to be honest. I trusted my perspective, judgment and identity enough that I knew that Kim was a good person and I knew that not in my wildest dreams could I imagine the sweet Quileute girl behaving a fraction as badly as I'd seen that other girl behaving towards her on my first day.

"Rock climbing!" The teacher shouted, pointing at the artificial wall that was set up for the lesson. It was massive, nearly touching the ceiling, with multi-coloured rocks interspersed evenly across. "Let's hope your form's a darn sight better than it was last week. And remember to flag!"

Five at a time were allowed, and I waited patiently for my turn behind the others. I tried not to feel isolated as I became aware I was the only person in gym class who wasn't talking to someone or who wasn't confidently standing nearby someone they obviously knew. Instead, I clasped my hands behind my back and watched the ascent of my classmates, trying not to tap my foot impatiently. I wasn't a very good waiter. Plus, it looked like the current rock climbers were using their climbing as an excuse to have a conversation with the person next to them, rather than to actually...well, climb, or even reach the top. At one point, a girl with powerful, big ringlets tossed a glance over her shoulder to Mrs. Parker and proclaimed that there was no chance in hell she was gonna reach the top. "Not in this world, Miss," she said, shouting to make up for the distance between her and the teacher, but she didn't really need to because, well, she hadn't actually climbed that far. "And not in the next one either."

Massaging the bridge of her nose with her fingers, in that moment Mrs. Parker had the air of someone who was long-suffering. "For Goodness' sake. Alright, then, get down, Yasmin. But next week I'm planning an activity you can't back out from, and if I receive anything less than your best, I'm calling your parents."

With a squawk of protest, 'Yasmin' began her descent, but not before turning to the girl next to her - well, she had been next to her, but now she was about half a metre above - and rattling off something angry-sounding.

Then it was my turn. Mrs. Parker gave me an affable nod as she looked over the harness I'd put on myself.

"Yep," she said, "You're good to go."

I began my ascent confidently and with ease, glancing up at the artificial wall to assess my bearings. Before I gripped each stone, I'd cast a glance above and around me and plan two steps ahead. That's what dad taught me. Staying stationary too long meant gravity had more of a chance to work its magic on you, meaning you're likely to get more fatigued. I was ascending with three other guys and a girl. The stones hurt my hands quite a bit as I gripped them - I didn't have callouses like I used to - and while my mouth squeezed shut into a grimace, I kept going. When I looked to my left to grab a new stone, I didn't see anyone else at eye-level. I looked up and grinned. Yes. I was going to get to the top first.

"Wilson!" Mrs. Parker's voice floated up the air of the sports hall. "Erm, it is Wilson, isn't it? Anyway, good form! Keep it up, girl!"

Spurred on, my grin widened as I reached the top, my breathing laboured but nothing I hadn't heard before. Once I'd eased myself down, I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. I took slow, deep breaths to relax myself, staring at the floor so that there were no distractions. The sight of dark grey and pink sneakers drawing nearer to me snagged my attention.

I looked up. Approaching me with a wide smile and a confident skip was the girl Jacob had scathingly referred to as 'cornrows'.

"Hey," she said affably, once she was a bit closer. She hadn't had her turn on the wall yet, so, unlike me, she wasn't breathing hard. "You're new here, right?"

I couldn't detect any hostility emanating from her, and when I looked into the girl's deep brown eyes, which were wide but not as wide as Kim's, and spaced closer together, I didn't sense that she was concealing any ill will.

"Yeah," I said, dropping to sit on the low assembly bench. "I am."

She sat down next to me. "I'm Duna." She pronounced her name like 'Doo-na'. "And you're…?"

"Francesca."

She smiled again, as if trying to prompt the amiability from me. "Cool name. Never met a Francesca before."

"I've never heard of yours."

"Yeah, my mom made it up. She's, like, obsessed with the beach. It's supposed to be a play on sand dunes. My last name is Sands." She shrugged one shoulder and smiled ironically, rolling her eyes at me like we were both in on the same joke, as if to say can you believe her?

I stared at her.

A vague inner visual was beginning to take shape inside my head: Draco Malfoy offering his hand to Harry in a sycophantic bid for friendship. I envisioned myself as Harry Potter himself, flicking a scornful gaze at the offered friendship.

"Interesting," I said coolly.

If Duna's hopeful spirits were at all affected by my concerted effort to distance myself from her, she didn't show it. Instead, she tucked a braided lock of hair behind her ear. "Anyway, I know moving to a new school must be overwhelming and stuff, but you've got a friend in me if you want one."

With one last smile that I couldn't read but didn't trust anyway, she got up and skipped away.

I didn't tell Kim about my bizarre interaction with the chick who obviously wasn't her numero uno fan. Instead, I offered her a snack-a-jack from the pack I'd brought in, and asked, "Have you looked at question 2f of Mr Burke's latest assignment?"

The four of us - Jacob, Kim, Jared and I - were sitting in the 'quad', an open-topped garden space bordered on each side by wood tech classrooms where students could sit on the grass and lounge in the sun. I sat back on my hands, completely content. The sky was blue and the rats from the sun were friendly on my face.

Kim blinked at me as she chewed delicately. "Um, no." She swallowed, then licked her lips. "Not yet."

"Oh, my god, you mean the one he set literally two days ago?" Jacob Black asked with disgust. "Man, you've started that already?"

While I'd met Jacob Black all of three days ago, I was beginning to get used to his acerbic predisposition. I didn't take it personally; he seemed like a pretty angry guy and I reasoned that he'd probably gone through some stuff to make him that way, stuff that I didn't know about. We all had our individual experiences and we all adapted to life as best we could with those experiences in mind. Physically, he was a very imposing character. He was at least 6'5, with a permanent irritable tic in his jaw, and eyes that did not seem 18 years old. On top of that, though, was the fact he was built. He and Jared were the most muscled up guys I had ever seen. It was a wonder that Jacob attended all his classes because if I'd never met him before and I saw him out of school for the first time, I'd wager he spent at least eight hours daily in the gym.

It was mad. Objectively, Jacob was very attractive. We were just sitting in the quad now, and I could see the way girls' gazes lingered on him as he walked past. On top of the desirably masculine physique, he had quite beautiful bone structure. Angular, strong, manifesting in a pouty, moody mouth. Still, I personally wasn't attracted to Jacob. He was much too waspy for me. Wasn't into the whole 'tall, dark, and moody' thing.

"I've finished it. I'm just stuck on that question. What does he mean by…" I squinted to try to remember the unfamiliar word. "Daesha, I think it is? I've tried an advanced Google search and everything, but no luck" I popped another snack-a-jack in my mouth and chomped happily. They were caramel flavour: my favourite.

"It's a concept."I was surprised when Jared spoke up. His voice was very deep, clear, and confident. One huge arms held Kim's comparatively tiny body against him as he said, "There are many of our legends which you'll only be able to find inside the pages of books. Books that are rarely looked at. It's the idea that the suffering we experience has powerful transcendental properties."

"Transcendental of what?" I asked.

"The idea is that suffering increases empathy," Jared said. "Pain is never experienced for pain's sake. It is given to us because it increases our empathy. And empathy is the foundation of love."

Predictably, Jacob snorted. "You're such a goddamn cherry-picker. That is a small part of what it's about."

"How?" Jared demanded. "That's the exact teaching."

Jacob turned to look at me, and began to explain, "Samanyuoke was a tribal warrior who was tasked by the great Spirit Chief Warrior, Dasak, with guarding the Quileute people from evil spirits. I won't bore you with the details, but he failed. As a result, a lot of people died. Failure to protect the tribespeople was at the time looked upon as the highest dishonour. Like, the highest dishonour, and because he failed, Dasak cursed him t embody all Quileute folk at once, so he could experience the suffering of all the people he had supposedly let down, again and again, over and over."

I was, in a word, confused. "So...you mean he was turned into all Quileute people?"

"Sort of. His consciousness was spread across the entire tribe, or so they say."

"Like reincarnation, but...happening all at once?"

Jacob nodded in the affirmative. "Exactly."

"So it's like a fable," I said, "that illustrates Daesha, and Daesha is the idea that suffering's transcendental properties make it a good thing." As I said the words, I mentally wrote the answer onto the section of the worksheet I'd left blank because I didn't know the answer. Hm. Sounded OK.

"Not a fable," Jacob said shortly. "A myth, a legend. It's different."

"Of course," I said immediately. "Sorry, I didn't mean to reduce its value. It's really interesting. But I mean...I still don't really see how that's supposed to show that suffering is transcendental."

"Me neither," said Jacob coldly. He was picking grass with his fingers and then tossing it aside. "It's supposed to show that, like, experiencing pain means you've got a greater capacity to understand the pain of others', but I don't buy it. Here on the we're taught that Samanyuoke was this great failure who deserved what he got because he didn't protect the tribe. But protecting a tribe is a hard-ass job," Jacob argued, fierce dark eyes alight with passion. "Why the fuck would he have failed on purpose? And now we talk about him hundreds of years later like he was some terrible person because he wasn't as capable as he thought it was. It's just bullshit."

"Hardly uncalled for." Jared stared at Jacob with hard eyes. "Samanyuoke wanted to protect his people, and duelled several other men who might actually have succeeded in protecting the tribe. He knew what he was getting himself into, and he went for it, and he failed. He got what he deserved."

"Oh, please. Since when is basically endless suffering a just punishment for anything?"

"He had a responsibility." Jared's voice was rising above a volume you'd consider an 'inside' or even an 'outside' voice. Kim, who was still sitting on his lap, glanced up at his face and settled a hand on his forearm, presumably as a soothing gesture. "And he failed."

"Responsibility isn't the be all and end all," Jacob hissed. "There are more important things than protecting people all the time." The sharp-tongued Quileute boy spat out the word 'protecting' as if he was sick of it being in his mouth.

"What could be more important than loss of life?" demanded Jared. While he certainly did not seem as incensed as Jacob, from his raised voice and defensive stature I got the strangest sense that something - though I didn't know what - was rising to the surface. "What could be more important than protecting your family and those not powerful enough to defend themselves?"

"Whatever happened to giving the hero a damn break once in a while? Oh, so just because someone's got a magic power or is freakishly strong or super wise, that means they're given a life sentence to saving everybody else's sorry ass? Hell,no. Newsflash, Jared, maybe people should pull their finger out and save themselves for once."

Wow. I didn't know that Quileute people had such strong views about their legends. I watched as Jacob and Jared seemed to be having a battle with their eyes, their respective gazes so emotional, so full of something I couldn't pinpoint, something I didn't have a word for. All I knew was that after sharing an uneasy glance with Kim, who leaned her head back to whisper something urgent-sounding in Jared's ear, I turned to Jacob. "Maybe people would save themselves," I said, hoping Jacob's temper could be cooled by my appeal for reason and rationality. "If they knew how to."

For one long moment, Jacob merely looked at me.

Then, without saying a word, he got up and left.

* * *

"I meant to ask you something earlier," I said to Kim as the two of us walked to our respective final period classes. "What's the wildlife like in La Push?"

"What do you mean?"

"My new house is in Green Grove, and the forest that borders my house is the one that leads to First Beach. Well, I was hiking to First Beach the other night and it was getting pretty late so I walked back. And, well...as I was walking back, I swear I heard, like, a wolf or something." I blushed as the word left my mouth. 'Wolf'. Ugh, I sounded like an idiot even to my own hears. Either an idiot, or something with some sort of auditory disorder. "I know it's probably nothing but my dad was pretty worried and I thought that you'd know what it was, since you've grown up here and everything." I stopped my babble to take a deep breath in. "Do you know what it could have been?"

For a few long moments, Kim didn't look at me. A feeling of awkwardness grew inside me as we walked slowly along the hallway.

"Probably a fox," she said finally.

"Ah, I knew it! That's what I told my dad. It's the sound they make to mark territory against other foxes, right?"

"Right."

"I was just afraid because it was really dark, and it sounded exactly like a wolf. It was such a loud howl, and I was on my own, so I probably wasn't thinking straight."

Kim's subsequent laugh was tight.

I found Kim's clippedness a bit odd, but decided not to press. Instead, I changed the conversation. "So, you're sure Jacob's alright?"

After Jacob's bizarre abrupt departure earlier, Kim had reassured me that he was fine, that this was a regular occurrence, and that it was nobody's fault.

"He's fine, I'm sure," she said softly. "He just...has a quick temper, as I'm sure you've noticed."

Yeah, you could say that again. "Maybe he's just really passionate about Quileute legends," I guessed.

Kim's laugh sounded tight and not at all at ease. Over the past few days at school, I had gotten to know Kim reasonably well - as well as you could know a girl who wasn't fond of eye-contact and blushed at every fifth thing I said. She was very nice, don't get me wrong, and she was very friendly, but the friendship that seemed to have developed between us - amiable chatter as we walked to the three classes we were in together, light 'getting to know each other' chatter at lunch - was marked by a guardedness on her part that I couldn't properly articulate. I just got the impression that she was holding me at arm's length all the time, yet at the same time, weirdly, really was interested and invested in being my friend.

Hm. Perhaps I'd put all my eggs in one basket too soon. Relieved and happy that the first person I'd met at Quileute Tribal High wanted to be friends with me, I hadn't tried to make friends with anyone else, and had in fact half-way spurned the advances of someone who'd explicitly said they'd wanted to be my friend.

Speaking of which…

"Hey," I said, as our walks slowed down the wide hallway. This is where the two of us branched off; I had maths just further down the corridor, and Kim had to go through the double-doors and then downstairs to reach her own maths class. "I wasn't sure how to approach the subject, but Duna, one of the girls who was rude to you on my first day here, is actually in my PE class. She...spoke to me."

Just as I anticipated, Kim ducked her head, that shiny, black sheet of hair dropping to cover her expression from my view. I was beginning to realise that she used her hair as both her protection and her defence.

"Oh, really?" she asked.

"Yeah." I paused, and the two of us stood there, with students milling past us like water over rocks. "I made it fairly clear that I wasn't interested, but I think she wanted to be friends. Or that's what she said, anyway."

"I hope you didn't refuse because of me," she said, voice just above a whisper. "Look, I know that...that the boys don't think very highly of Duna or Marissa, but they are...they are nice girls at heart. So you shouldn't feel bad for hanging out with them, if that's what you want."

Kim had ignored my obvious request to know what the hell was going on with her and those two girls. I struggled not to pry where I wasn't wanted, but at the same time I was curious, and I felt like since Duna herself had approached me, she had in some ways roped me into a place where I felt like I had the right to ask what was going on between the three girls. What had Duna and 'Marissa' do to warrant Jared and Jacob's fierce dislike? Better yet, what had Kim, whose spirit animal must have been a fawn, done to afford the two girls' antagonism?

I was enshrouded by vague threads of mystery, not just with the Duna and Marissa thing, but with Jacob and Jared, too. All around me people were behaving in ways I didn't understand for reasons I felt I wasn't allowed to ask.

And I hated not knowing. I hated not understanding.

"That's diplomatic," I noted, trying not to ignore the way Kim's gaze roamed my face anxiously at my cutting tone. "Anyway, better get to class."

A quality Kim and I shared was that we both liked to arrive in class ten minutes early. Usually, the two of us would have lingered a little longer in the hallway, chit-chatting and whatnot. I could tell, from her nervous eyes which, to make a change, were looking directly into mine, that she had read my abruptness as dismissal (correctly so).

I felt guilty. And petty. But at the same time, I believed that my feelings were justified. So I said, "See you later," and walked past her to my classroom.

The, "Bye, Francesca," I received in return was feather-soft, with nearly imperceptible threads of regret woven through.

* * *

 **While I've received a few favourites and a few followers, I have not yet received any reviews. I eagerly await to receive some, and would be so grateful if you took a minute to write one for me. Really, I just want to know what you think. This is the first FanFiction I've written, and I feel like I'm batting in the dark most of the time, so it would be very helpful to know what you like and what you don't like, what you think works and what you think doesn't work. Thank you kindly, sweet reader.**


	3. Chapter 3

I wasn't an arty person, really. I was more of a functional, hands-on kinda gal.

But I was the designated interior designed of mine and my dad's new home, and I was taking my responsibility _very_ seriously.

One of the first things I'd done when I'd been told we were leaving Topeka was to explore what I could do with the new space. The only information I'd received was that it was 'pretty open, with big windows...oh, and no doorways'. I visualised an open plan space dominated by a spiral staircase, and wide, inviting bay windows beckoning a green landscape. I imagined hanging beaded curtains made of smoky oranges and reds and deep, mysterious blues off the doorways, and leaving a windchime at the front door to clink gently beneath a twilight sky, welcoming in visitors...

I puffed as I threw an old soiled sheet that had been loved to death by our old dog Reggie over my dad's double bed. He'd been a very goood boy with an entire treasure chest of various toys that dogs were supposed to find captivating, but little Reg was at his happiest when chewing on any sort of fabric that he wasn't allowed to get his teeth on. One Christmas I'd gotten Dad this really nice set of Egyptian cotton linens - we're talking a threadcount of 1000 here - which Reg had positively gone to town on when we left him alone in the house for no more than an hour.

That was the one and only time I'd been in a mood with my dog. No treats were had that day.

I'd already shifted the bedside table out of the way of the walls so that they formed an island of misplaced furniture in the middle of the room. I was wearing my most faded pair of overalls, and my hair was slicked back into a high ponytail, my fringe clipped back and away from my face.

Right, I thought, clapping my hands together and craning my neck around my father's minimalist bedroom once more to make sure I'd moved everything within paint flicking range safely out of the way. Though my father was an extraordinarily even-tempered man, he hated carelessness as much as I did. I imagined him coming home from a long and tiresome day at work to find that I'd ruined his trusty, three-year-old bedroom slippers made of lambswool, and my eye started twitching. My father was a master of the 'I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed in you' face.

Stepping back, I eyed the progress I'd made with the wall to the left of dad's bed. I'd primed the wall - and, I had to admit, I was pretty impressed with how even I'd managed to make it - and the tape I'd put over the trim was still looking secure. Pretty good job for a novice. And I really _was_ a novice. I'd headed to good old Auntie Google to aid me with my wall-painting endeavours; the instructions had _sounded_ simple enough, but when I was scrubbing at the wall to clean it with a sponge and a solution of mainly water and a few drops of washing up liquid, the thought whirring around and around in my head was: don't get complacent, Francesca. You poop up this this wall, and dad is _not_ going to be happy. My dad was a lenient sort of man, and allowed me to do all the cooking and cleaning because he knew I was particular and liked it a certain way, but allowing him to forego creative control of the house had not been a straightforward job. There had been a lot of uhming and ahming on my dad's behalf on the flight up, and the six hour layover had mainly been comprised of me holding up my new '52 Interesting Interior Designs' book to my father's reticent face and saying, "Wouldn't this design just _perfectly accommodate_ that lamp Larry got you for Christmas?" and "You know I've never been a fan of our sofas, but don't you think just that anything could look good against this chartreuse wall?"

Finally, he had relented (he always did) with the contingency that I had to run all my ideas by him. Like an eager puppy, I had agreed. He hadn't been a fan of the art-deco monochrome theme that the book on interior design promised was in vogue, and he also had't been a fan of the minimalist theme I'd suggested, arguing that what made a home a home were the little knick-knacks a person owned. After shrugging, I had agreed.

Experimentally, keeping my grip tight, I dipped the paint roller into the pale olive colour the container called ''Glow On, Olive'. For one moment, I suspended the paint roller in the air. It was heavier than I thought. I left it there, in the air, for a few seconds, ensuring the excess paint had dripped off.

I took a deep breath. Then I put the roller to the wall and got to work.

That's how my dad found me, four hours later, the only difference being that I had migrated from the left-hand wall to the right-side one.

"Frankie," he said, voice tinged with surprise. "This looks great."

My cheeks were a livid red from the slow, steady labour of painting, but a blush still managed to creep up my cheeks anyway. "Thanks, dad," I said, unfolding myself from the floor to look around at my work. The pale olive colour coated the left-hand wall, while the wall that acted as a backdrop to the double bed was painted a rich, chocolatey brown that I knew would work well with dad's plain, dark grey linens. Now, I was working on the wall to the right of the door as you entered, with that soft olive colour reaching a third of the wall. While I wasn't done yet, already the new colours were throwing off rich, earthy vibes. Mmmm. Cosy.

"You like it then?" I asked, eyeing him from the corner of my eye. "My book really emphasised the importance of warm colours if you're trying to make a small space cosy."

"I love it. How long you been working for, kiddo?"

"As soon as you left for work, maybe four hours ago? It's been pretty solid work."

Winding his arm around my shoulders, he leaned down to kiss me, his scratchy, ginger beard grazing my face in a way that was so pleasantly familiar. "You've done a better job than I could ever have dreamed of doing, daughter of mine. Can I thank you with a takeaway?"

"Daddy," I said warningly, pointing the pizza takeaway pamphlet at him from where I stood at the kitchen counter, by the phone. "Takeout doesn't have to be unhealthy. We're not ordering pizza."

Groaning, my father slumped back on the yellow cord couch in the connected living room, beginning to unlace his big, industrial boots. "Please. It's been a long day and I just want to sit back and relax with a nice, big tray of carbs. Is that too much to ask for, wicked daughter of mine?"

"It's a lot to ask of your heart _and_ your cholesterol, which has beared the brunt of your poor eating habits for the past forty-five years," I said sternly. "Do you remember the picture of those nice, healthy veins and heart that Dr. Mackenstein showed us?"

I received a grunt in response."

"That's what I thought. I'm not doing this to hurt you, daddy, I'm doing it because I love you and I want you alive on this earth for as long as possible." I had stolen that last line from a movie about a woman who fell in love with an alcoholic, minus the 'daddy', but I wasn't about to tell my dear old papa that. "So what would you prefer, then? Mediterranean, or sushi?"

At about 8pm, I opened the door to the delivery girl who was shivering slightly under a bruised coloured sky. I exchanged a $5 tip in exchange for a grateful smile and a delicious-smelling carrier bag.

Settling the bag down on the counter, I received wafts from the food that made my mouth water. I cleared my throat and my father looked around from where he had his feet up on the ottoman, watching the football.

His eyes lit up when he saw me slide a full-fat Coke out of the bag, another outlawed food product in the Wilson household.

"I'm not a total monster, am I?" I asked primly, pouring him a big glass.

"You are rather lovely on the odd occasion, I'll admit."

Five minutes later, the two of us were settled down with our respective dishes in our lap - I had griddled vegetables with sweet potato and Quinoa salad, and dad had chorizo pilaf - and a psychological thriller. Psychological thrillers were always the genre of choice between the two of us if we were settling down with a takeaway; I got a thrill from being scared and didn't have to face the more full-on genre of horror, while my dad, logician that he was, liked to analyse what was happening so he could predict how the film would end.

"So she's claiming that he's her ex-boyfriend from back home," my father was saying to me, eyes on the screen, a chunk of chorizo speared on the end of his fork. "But you know in the beginning of the film when it panned to a shot of her and another guy when they were thirteen and she said it was her brother? Well, I think Tim is her brother and he's shaved his head and donned the construction gear and the scar as a disguise."

"Eh...a shaved head is hardly a disguise. " I reached out to my glass of Coke and took a big gulp, welcoming the sweet fizz down my throat. "But on that note, why is it always the case in movies that they're all conveniently so stupid? How can Harrison not _recognise_ that that's his childhood best friend?"

My father shook his head, eyes still trained on the television. "It's the film industry. They don't have any balls. Movies like this are a dime a dozen, and it's only once every, what, two, three years that something worthwhile actually comes out."

Watching films with my father was always an inevitable descent into having a conversation about how the film industry treats its audience like dummies. We had the same conversation pretty much every week.

" _Get Out_ ," my father said, citing the title of one of his favourite recent psychological thrillers. "Now that was something worth watching. That was...man, that really was worth paying money to go and see. And buying the DVD. The way the film industry talks about losing money through loss of DVD sales, you'd think the solution was out of their hands. Well, boo-fucking-hoo, you make something worth spending money on, and people will spend their money on it. It's hardly rocket science."

"That's way too much of a simplistic argument," I argued. "With technology literally swarming the masses, it's much easier to get ahold of easy and digestible entertainment. Years and years ago, I remember when you'd take me to the cinema and it'd be a real treat, a real occasion. Now people can get their hands on exactly what they want with no trouble at all. A person's full, undivided attention is one of life's biggest values at the moment, and the industry know that it's much easier to get people's attentions via pandering to their, I don't know, _wish fulfillment_ , let's say, than an actual, good story."

" _Easier_ to get people's attentions that way, but not impossible to do it the right way. Hell, looking at David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'. That book is the definition of doing gruelling hard work with your butt in the chair, and it _blew up_ the market. People do want challenging and good material, if only the directors could be bothered. Really, it's an issue of laziness. They're much too focused on what the actors and actresses look like. Everything has to look so polished. Everything has to look like it's fake. It's like the more they can deviate something from average, the better it is. But that's just not true."

I shrugged. "Populate a cast with beautiful people that your eyes don't want to look away from and people aren't gonna wanna look away from the movie. It's a money-making scheme."

My father and I continued to bicker back and forth as we watched the film and filled our bellies, and then he kissed me goodnight and we went into our own rooms.

My dad hummed thoughtfully as he chewed. "You know that babies tend to look at symmetrical faces more than asymmetrical ones?" At my surprised look, my father nodded importantly. "Yep. Even babies know what beautiful is. There could be some weight to your words."

We continued to bicker into the night into I felt my eyes closing. Dad kissed me on the head and ushered me up to my bedroom. Though it was dark, I could smell the static of a brewing storm through my open window. I pulled the window forth, leaving it slightly ajar, and then shut the curtains. After dressing in my winter flannel pyjamas, I tucked the duvet right up to my chin. I fell asleep not too long after that, to the sound of rain.

For the first time since starting Quileute Tribal High, I dreaded going in.

Well, that maybe a little bit of an exaggeration. I wasn't _dreading_ going in, but I certainly wasn't bounding up to its iron-cast gates with enthused strides and a silly grin

Today was a Monday, and today was also the day I'd resolved with myself to go into school and reopen my quest to find friends. Though I'd merely been a little blunt more than exercising any real meanness, thinking back to the snarky way I had treated Kim last Friday embarrassed me more than I'd care to admit. But while I knew that I deserved to feel bad because I hadn't behaved in line with the standard I set for myself, I also believed that I should be extending some kindness to myself too, and the fact of the matter was that Kim was not a straightforward person. It was just a fact. She hid behind her hair and softened her voice and averted her gaze when she didn't want to answer a question, or didn't want to talk about something, or was too shy to say something, and it turns out that the answer to the question "what makes Kim squirm?" was "a hell of a lot." There was too much reading between the lines, and I hated jumping through hoops. Where it could be, life should always be simple (quote credit to Darren Wilson - thanks Dad) and I wasn't about to waste my time on people who not only didn't share this view, but who turned the antithesis of this view into their religion. Nuh-uh, no thanks.

But as I walked into school, my backpack heavy on my shoulders since Monday was the most demanding day stationery wise, a thread of nervousness wound through my belly. My first period class was maths, which Kim wasn't in, which would also make the whole 'try to make friends with people who aren't Kim' thing easier and much less awkward. Like always, the room was empty when I entered save from the teacher, who glanced up at me from her desk, smiled, and said hello.

Playing with my fingers, my eyes darted towards the door every now and then as students filtered in in twos and threes. I sat where I'd been sitting for maths for the past week or so, which was at the table in the middle and then to the right. I was right on the end.

Pulling out the chair beside me and throwing a careless glance at me, a boy with close cropped hair and deep-set eyes sat down and began shrugging his coat off.

I darted a glance at him. Perhaps he could be my new friend? Although he was giving off vibes that said he thought I was about as interesting as the tapestry.

"You should all have brought in the worksheet we didn't manage to finish off last week," Mr. Elton said, a tall, serious figure. I'd yet to see the salt-and-pepper-haired man smile, but he explained things in a simple and comprehensible way, so he was in my good books. Beside me, the boy muttered 'fuck'. "To those of you who brought it in: well done. To those of you who didn't: please get your life in order." A snicker rippled through the class, and when I glanced slyly at the classmate sat to my left, I saw him rolling his eyes. "Anyway, we'll resume roughly where we left off, which to my knowledge was on quadratic equations, but do correct me if I'm wrong. Those ruffians who forgot today's worksheet, turn to the person sitting next to you, hope that they're a little more organised than yourself, and ask very nicely if you can share." A shuffle of movement opened up in the classroom, and I heard, rather than saw, the guy sitting next to me sigh deeply.

He then proceeded to turn to the person on the other side of him - who wasn't me.

I turned to look to my right, where no one sat, because there was no chair there. I slumped back into my seat with a huff, inwardly raising a salute to invisible friends.

"Sorry," I said to a random student whose shoulder I bumped. The rush between first and second period class had us students acting as waves, and I rode the wave down the stairs, keeping check to stay as close to the wall as possible.

Kim was already inside, along with a handful of others, doodling on her notebook and humming softly. I took my place next to her as I normally did in Religious Education class.

She shut her notebook. When she turned her gaze to me, I detected no salient memory of my abruptness with her last Friday, just the typical shyness and warmth. "How was your weekend?" she asked softly.

Over the weekend, the overall softness of Kim, the feather-light gentleness that made you want to gather her up and protect her, was something I'd forgotten. Unpacking my bag and laying my water bottle, pencil case, notepad and notebook in their order in front of me as was my routine now at the school, I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and levelled my gaze on her.

"Hey," I said cheerfully, putting a smile on my face that may or may not have been unnaturally wide due to guilt. "My weekend was pretty relaxing, thanks. I did a little hiking and I painted the house."

"Oh, cool! Which colour did you end up settling on?"

"That 'Glow On, Olive' colour, you know the really pale, sort of rustic green?" At Kim's nod, I sat down, playing with my fingers. "That one. How was your weekend?"

One of Kim's narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. "Spent it with Jared mainly." While I'd only known Kim a couple of weeks, I'd inferred that her relationship with her boyfriend was, in a word, serious. Very serious. They spent a _lot_ of time together.. Aside from in class, if I saw Kim during breaks, Jared was always there, which was normal enough, but whenever I asked Kim what her plans were after school or whatever, her answer was always the same: she spent it with Jared.

While this did seem like wet moppish behaviour to me, I couldn't judge. I'd never been in a relationship or even kissed a guy on the lips before; things like getting butterflies or being in love were all foreign concepts of me. What would I know about being in love?

The answer was that I didn't. Still, I couldn't imagine spending as much time with someone as Kim did with Jared without getting absolutely sick of them. What did you talk about for that long? Was it ever awkward or uncomfortable?

"My sister got into a really prestigious college," Kim shared a rare glean of information into her life. "So me and my family went to this really neat cocktail bar in Washington town to celebrate. My sister ended up throwing up." Kim rolled her eyes.

I snorted. "How old is she?"

"Same age as me. We're twins."

I gaped. "How are you only telling me this now?" I exclaimed. "You're a twin? Really?"

Rather than blushing, as I expected her to, Kim gave a light, floaty laugh. "Really. We're identical and everything."

My interest was piqued. But before I could ask anymore questions, Mr. Burke entered. Looking a little windswept, he strode to the front of the class and clapped his hands together. "Sorry I'm late, class. Traffic was hectic. So, to continue on from last week…"

* * *

This whole making friends thing really wasn't going to plan, I reflected as Kim and I walked slowly from break to our third period class (which we also had together). She must have seen the slightly morose expression on my face because, as we walked softly over the damp grass, she asked, "What are you thinking?"

 _What are you thinking?_ The question struck me as strange before I realised that I was experiencing a sense of familiarity because it was the question my dad asked me whenever I was gazing into the distance and frowning thoughtfully.

That must be what I was doing now.

"Just…" I shrugged, leaning my head back to look up at the sky. Another lovely clear day. "I don't know. I suppose...things were easier back in Topeka in the sense that I grew up with the same couple of handfuls of people and we all went to high school together, etcetera. I didn't have to be curious about anyone because I knew everyone. And they knew me. But here…" I trailed off, looking at the grass as we walked on, focusing on the faint noises of traffic passing behind the school. "I guess I'm just worried I haven't put in enough effort to make friends with other people."

Rather than getting offended, or ducking her head and not responding for at least ten seconds like I thought she would, Kim hummed thoughtfully to herself and said, "Well...you could always join a society if you want to make more friends."

"Yeah," I mused. " I did think about doing that actually."

"The societies committee is pretty active, depending on what you're looking for. There's an established fencing team, believe it or not," Kim said, smiling as I raised my eyebrows. "Arts and crafts is pretty big, and all the sports teams are pretty full to capacity, too."

"How would I go about joining a society? Is there an office somewhere around here?"

"Oh, it's in the office right by the gym. I could show you during lunch if you want. My sister actually heads the committee and she's...well, she takes her role pretty seriously." Kim rolled her eyes and snorted, as if laughing at a private joke. "She reminds me a lot of you, if you don't mind me saying." That shy smile again. "Anyway, if you want to join a club, she's your girl."

She really was, it turns out, my girl.

I poked my head into the office. "Hey! Are you Annette?"

Tapping speedily on a keyboard, a bespectacled girl with a thick, waist-length braid hanging down her back, who looked _so much_ like Kim that it honestly frightened me a little, looked up. "That's me. Can I help you?"

I got straight to the point. "Yeah, Kim pushed me in your direction. I was wondering if it's not too late to sign up to a few societies?"

Her eyes lit up. She clapped her hands together. "No! Not at all! Let me get you a sign up sheet. What's your name?" She'd gotten up to move towards a stack of sheets sitting beside a printer, but then spun back around to face me. "In fact...you look new. Are you? New, I mean? I've never seen you before so I assume you're new." She looked at me expectantly.

Reeling slightly from the contrast between this boisterous personality inside of Kim's body, I replied, "Yeah, I'm new."

"I thought so." Brandising a sheet and scrawling something at the top, she fixed those eyes on me which resembled the unblinking gaze fixture of an owl. Huh. I wondered if Kim needed glasses as well and just didn't wear them. "Name, please?"

"It's Francesca Wilson. F-R-A-N-C-E-S-C-A." I stepped further into the room, casting my gaze across the den-resembling office space crammed full of administrative items - a computer, a photocopier, a printer, stacks of faceless sheets of paper balanced on all possible surfaces.

She might have been following the trail of my gaze, because she said, "It's an absolute hovel in here, right? I've been single-handedly trying to tidy up years of other people's negligence, throwing away everything that looks like junk while holding onto the important stuff. Turns out that the line between the two isn't so clear." She snorted. "Ah, well, this is what _I_ signed up for."

She handed the sheet and I saw my name written beside the 'NAME' heading in neat, cursive capital letters.

"I know you're perfectly capable of writing your own name, but my eyesight isn't so hot so I try to avoid any and all situations where I might have to decipher something. I really feel it in my head when I've been squinting, you know?"

Looking at the sheet, I spotted categories like 'water sports', 'arts and craft', 'gymnasium' etc. "Can I fill this out now?"

"Go ahead, take a seat anywhere! I'll give you a pen. They're like gold dust in here, honestly."

I felt bad. I felt really bad.

Here I was, having, well, not mean, but definitely on the cooler side of lukewarm, thoughts about Kim and moping about not having made good enough friends, and here she was pushing me in the direction of the societies office and generally being a good friend and helping me to be able to make other friends. After I'd expressed my interest in certain societies with ticks, namely hiking, rock climbing, and arts and crafts - the last one because...well, why not? I liked trying new things - I had been let go with a promise from Annette that she'd have me seamlessly joining my chosen societies within the next week or so. 'The hikers in particular are always looking for joiners because most guys and gals are age are just so lazy, right? Most people struggle to get out of bed before 9am, nevermind voluntarily hiking a mile or two,' Annette had said scornfully. I had emphatically agreed.

"Hey, Kim," I said brightly, throwing my bag down on the floor of the table that had become my staple in the cafeteria. Jared and Jacob were already sat down, paying impressively single-minded attention to the mound of food in front of them. I could spot at least an entire baking tray and a half's worth of frybread, as well as an indistinguishable dish with a side of rice that smelled of tomatoes and spices. A growl tore from my stomach and, eyes wide, I self-consciously glanced up to find Jacob looking at me with a smirk.

 _God._ Had he heard that?

"Hey," Kim replied, smiling up at me. A more modest portion of what the guys had was in front of her, barely touched. They must have just arrived. "Did you manage to find her?"

"Yeah!" I perched on one of the spare seats. "She was really helpful. I signed up to hiking and rock-climbing society as well as arts and crafts. Are you-?"

A snort from Jacob cut me off.

I rolled my eyes before fixing my gaze on him. "What?" I asked, exasperated.

"Arts and crafts?" Jacob was speaking with his mouth full, but I managed to make out the words he said even though the sound was very distorted. I wrinkled my nose. I didn't think the girls who fawned over him would retain even a quarter of their interest if they witnessed his appalling table manners. Elbows on the table, sloppy eating, plus consuming the food at a pace that suggested that it was going out of fashion.

Gross.

"Take it from me, Frankie." I couldn't pinpoint when Jacob had begun calling me Frankie, but after the first few initial moments of it being weird because the only person who called me that was my dad, I started to think it was sort of...nice. Jacob was as abrasive as a brillo pad and as sardonic as anyone I would ever meet, so when he called me by my nickname I got a sort of warm feeling, like he was a lot more redeemable than I gave him credit for. "There is no arts and crafts society," he continued (still with his mouth open, I noticed with a wince). "What happens is every Wednesday afternoon, the rejects of the school gather together in room B4 to share their nerdy comic book drawings. You're thinking it's all pastels and painting and shit. I promise, it's not."

"It's called anime," Kim said, sounding affronted. Glancing at her, I noticed her brow furrowed, a rare expression of negative emotion that I found very interesting because only Jacob seemed to be able to evoke it from her. "And it's an art-form like any other. Admittedly, it gets a bad rep because-"

Another snort from Jacob. "'Art form' is a stretch. The only place it's an art-form is-"

"Hey, asshole." Elbowing him roughly, and lifting his head, for once, from his food, Jared turned to cast Jacob a warning looking. "Let her finish."

Jacob muttered something under his breath which I didn't catch, but which made Jared jerk his gaze to him once more to give him a warning look, but the acerbic Quileute boy didn't say anything more.

"As I was saying," Kim continued, clearing her throat and resting her comparatively tiny hand over her boyfriend's pint-sized one. Jared cast a warm glance in her direction and linked their hands together, putting his head down to continue eating his food. "The people who go there do mainly focus on animation and stuff like that, but they bring along all sorts of materials so if you want to paint, you can paint, or if you want to draw landscapes with watercolours you can do that. The only thing they're not a fan of for some reason is charcoals but that's only because there was a bit of a fiasco involving a tin of them a couple years back."

I frowned as I tried to imagine what sort of fiasco could have happened to have made the art society abandon them as a tool altogether.

"But go, and see you if you like it," Kim urged, smiling warmly at me. "I bet you'd have loads of fun and it's a perfect way to meet new people."

"If you do end up going," Jacob said, waiting a few seconds after Kim had finished talking, probably so he wasn't on the receiving end of another of Jared's death glares. "Then bring Kim with you. She misses it."

My tummy rumbled again, and I put a hand over it as if to say _stop that_. "Oh? You used to go?"

"I used to," was the reluctant-sounding response. The long-haired Quileute girl was no longer looking at me, but was instead spearing a few green beans with her fork. "But the Wednesday afternoon thing wasn't working out for me. I-"

"Bullshit," interrupted Jacob. "You stopped going because of tweedle-dee." Jerking his head diagonally to the right, I followed the motion and found those two girls that had behaved so contemptuously towards Kim on my first day at school. Duna was laughing loudly at something on a phone Marissa was holding close to her face. "Admit it."

My friend looked very uncomfortable. "I didn't _stop_ going because of her, it just became not so fun to be there anymore, that's all."

"Did Duna go to art society too, then?" I asked, trying to decode the conversation I only partially understood the context of."

A nod of the head affirmed my question. "She paints," Kim explained. "She's really good, too. I prefer watercolours, though."

"Duna Sands is _hardly_ a good artist," Jacob scoffed. "For example, Frankie, one of Duna's best known works is this piece where she's just painted loads of red telephones on a beige background. Now, does that sound interesting to you?"

"She's very influenced by Magritte," Kim explained to me. "Some of her artwork's up in E block if you want to have a look."

Jacob's subsequent eye-roll was so exaggerated I thought it might actually have caused some corneal strain.

"I'm gonna go get some food," I said, standing up and stretching my arms above my head. A rewarding click made me sigh. "See you in a sec."

As I turned around, I inwardly, and maybe a little outwardly too, groaned. The line that had formed while I was talking to Jacob and Kim had grown exponentially into the the biggest snake ever. I walked to the back of the queue, passing a girl in my Chemistry class who I had engaged in small chit-chat with. Her lips pulled up in a smile, and I gave a brief little wave. As I settled at the back of the queue, a warmth settled in my stomach.

Things seemed to really be working out for me at Quileute Tribal High.

After I was handed my tray of food, I stared down at the deliciousness. There were no tags beside the pyrex dishes of food beneath the warmer display, so while I knew that what I held in my hands smelt amazing, I didn't actually know what any of it was

Turning around to walk back to the table, I saw that there was someone at the table who hadn't been there before. In fact, I don't think I'd seen him yet at school, not even in passing in the hallways.

Because I knew that if I did, I would surely remember.

In a word, he was massive. Massive like Jared and Paul. Massive in a way that demanded others' attention, with shoulders so wide and corded I thought you could probably put two average men together and get the same silhouette. And his face…

In a word, he was, ah, very handsome. High cheekbones and a strong jaw cast his face as all angles, but his mouth, for want of a better word, was pouty. It was the sort of mouth that at its resting state made the rest of the face look like it was sulking.

He, whoever he was, also looked supremely pissed off.

Jacob had a permanent agitated and sardonic slant to his mouth, as though he was in constant reckoning with something that he never directly articulated, that instead manifested in sudden bursts of anger at bizarre conversation topics.

But this guy's mouth was curled in a sneer, and there was something in his demeanour, maybe the tightness in his shoulders, the way he sat so upright and alert, that said _don't come near me._ Right now, he was saying something in a low voice to Jacob, who himself seemed to be angrily engaged in whatever conversation they were having. My eyes slid to Jared, who was still holding Kim's hand but had his head inclined towards the conversation with the other two boys.

God, what the hell was in the water on the rez? The three boys, having a fervent, low conversation about something that didn't sound pleasant at all cut striking figures. I watched as glances lingered over their frames, and on the guy I'd never met before in particular,, but the three of them seemed either oblivious or uncaring of the attention they were attracting.

Hotness crept up my neck and onto my cheeks as I slid my tray onto the table, next to Kim and opposite the guy I was unfamiliar with.

I caught a "...honestly thinks he can use me as bait, I'll show the motherfucker he's got another thing coming," from the one I didn't recognise.

"Francesca, you haven't met Paul, have you?" Kim said brightly, too brightly. She said the guy's name - Paul - loudly, as though she was communicating something other than merely getting his attention.

Suddenly, I felt very out of place.

That sneer was still infusing those handsome features with malice as 'Paul' lifted his eyes to mine.

I swallowed as I met his eyes, angry and stormy in a way that made Jacob's waspishness seem positively amiable. His gaze was full of a darkness I didn't understand, and didn't think that I could understand, even if he tried to enlighten me.

And then his expression just...changed.

From where I stood, I heard his sharp intake of breath.

* * *

Hey, you! Just a note to say I am so appreciative of the reviews I've received thus far, and would really, really love it if I received some more! I mentioned this in the previous chapter, but as this is my first fanfiction I feel like I'm shooting in the dark a lot of the time, so any thoughts at all are highly regarded. Thank you xxx


	4. Chapter 4

In grade 10 a boy who had an unrequited crush on me had called me a frigid bitch when I'd turned down a prospective date. The image of my subsequent unimpressed cocked eyebrow had gone viral round school parts, and a new game was born; people would take turns going up to students at random and saying outrageously offensive things, with the aim of the being that the receiver of the insult remain stoic. A favourite of mine (because it had been said to a girl who was not such a favourite of mine) was, "Hey Sandrine, girls who look like you are the reason they arrange marriages." I still got a snort out of myself thinking about it to this day.

Anyway, the point of the story is that I don't wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I never really have. It's not because of any conscious effort on my part, or because I'm repressed or any of that malarkey, it's just that I don't think with my face.

But in that moment I was willing to bet that my face screamed: _Why is he looking at me like that? Why, oh why, is he looking at me like that?_

I wasn't the wife who he'd left at home for an unbearable number of years while he'd been staving off enemies at war. I wasn't the super skilled surgeon who specialised in the rare form of brain tumour he had that only I could excise. I wasn't the prestigious Ivy league acceptance letter waiting inside an innocuous brown envelope.

Because of all of these reasons, there was really no reason for him to be looking at me like that.

I'm sure years later I would remember the expression he was wearing as the most uncomfortable convergence of astonishment and elation that I had ever seen.

"Hello," I squeaked. "I'm Francesca."

His lips moved as though he was repeating my name, his eyes still fixated on me like his life depended on it.

If it was possible, Jacob was looking just as incredulous. "Christ, Paul, close your mouth," he hissed. "You're scaring her. Come on. Reign it in, bro."

Just like that, Paul's features devolved back into a more severe version of the one that Id seen as I'd been walking over unnoticed; pure and utter contempt.

"Get your eyes _off_ her _,_ " growled Paul, actually seeming to bare his teeth in fury.

Who was he talking about? Me? _Me?_ Was Paul actually demanding that Jacob stop looking at _me_?

Jared had pushed himself away from Kim and was now keening his head towards Paul, whispering words that I couldn't hear, but I did catch, "...gotta think, bro. If you scare her…" His eyes, too, were darting up to mine, and through the stoic veneer Jared normally wore I caught flashes of disbelief and piqued interest.

My heart was pounding an unfamiliar rhythm in my chest. I felt how I thought I might feel if I was plucked up up and put on Broadway in front of a huge crowd of people with high expectations.

I felt looked at. Gazed upon. I recalled Kim's words earlier: _"I've always been so aware of the skin I'm in_. _"_ How I felt in that moment gave a new credence to her words, and my very eyeballs felt like they were being pushed down by some invisible force. I realised a second later that the force was deep and penetrating self-consciousness.

Even Kim, whose unnuanced face normally just displayed variations of timidity, was looking at me as though she'd just discovered I'd grown antlers.

What the _hell_ was going?

"Is everything OK?" I asked slowly.

Paul hadn't looked away from me once. "Why are you still standing up?" he demanded. He sounded _angry_. "Sit _down_. Stay." That last word could not in any world be interpreted as a question. It was a commandment, a growl, an _order_.

I threw a helpless look at Kim. The only Quileute girl at the table looked like she had one hundred things she wanted to let fall from her tongue but she didn't know where to begin.

"I - I think I'm going to check out the library actually." I swallowed hard, and picked up my untouched lunch tray with shaky hands. "I'm suddenly not so hungry anymore."

The _crash_ Paul's chair made as it fell back onto the floor attracted the attention of everyone sitting nearby. It had fallen because he'd snapped to his feet, and now towered so far above me that even at this distance, separated by a table, I had to crane my neck. I gaped at his size. He stood and just kept going, like some sort of extendable human being.

And he was _still_ looking at me.

"No," he snarled. Strangely, I noticed that he seemed to be...shaking? The trembling of his arms and hands created a strange blurring illusion that reminded me of the haze surrounding the buzz of a bumblebee's wings - so fast you couldn't really see what was happening, but you could sense it. " _You can't leave_."

My cheeks burned as the senses of mine that didn't need eyes - since my gaze was fixed firmly on this man who I had only just met - registered that Paul was drawing a crowd. People had stopped in the middle of their conversations and stared unabashed. At us.

I watched, wide-eyed, as he stepped around the table and began to make his way towards me.

I scuttled back. My reaction was just that - reactive. Instinctual.

Lips drawing back into a snarl, Paul took a stride towards me. Leaping up together, Jared and Jacob grabbed Paul on either side and dragged him towards the cafeteria's exit. His shaking had really upped the ante. I was struck by how his trembling seemed to be entirely uncontrolled on his part, as though it happened _to_ him, rather than being something that he was _doing_.

But that wasn't the weirdest part of the most bizarre interaction I'd ever had in my life. No, the strangest part was that, as Jared and Jacob wrestled Paul to the cafeteria exit, I _swore_ I heard Paul growl as he rounded the corner: " _she's mine."_

* * *

What was I supposed to do when a freakishly massive guy I'd never met before started showing a bizarre interest in me? This was the question I asked myself as I hurried through my front door and took the steps two at a time. After going through to my room, I opened the second drawer of my desk, the designated 'space for unused things' that included, among other things, my very ignored mobile phone. Guilt churned in my stomach as I read that I had four missed calls and eleven messages - all from one person.

"Gabriel," I breathed when my best friend picked up the phone. "Before you say anything: I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I went incommunicado and that was shitty of me, and I'm sorry."

My best friend from Topeka, Kansas, huffed over the line. "I haven't heard from you in _weeks._ Two, to be exact!"

"I know," I groaned. "Trust me, I feel really bad about it, it's just things have been so weird on my end, Gabe, like really unsettlingly weird. And they culminated today when this guy I'd never met before had to be _dragged out_ of the cafeteria after he got weirdly possessive over me."

Gabriel gasped. "Oh, _honey_. The guilt trip can wait til later. Tell me everything."

So I did. When I was done talking, there was a pregnant pause over the line. "Well, fuck me," Gabe breathed. "You had me hooked at the whole tall, dark, and handsome thing, but then you got into the whole 'and then he jumped towards me' thing, and now all I can say is _get away_. I mean, _fuck_. Is he, what, mentally ill or something?"

"He has to be," I said, shaking my head. The arm wrapped around my tummy squeezed tighter. "There's no other explanation. There's literally - God." I shook my head; school had ended four hours ago, and lunch had ended six hours ago, but that bizarre scene from the cafeteria had been replaying through my mind over and over since it had first occurred. . "I _hate_ that I don't have an explanation for the way he behaved. I mean, I'd never _met_ the guy before, Gabriel. Do you think it's impolite to ask Kim if Paul has bipolar disorder or something?"

Gabe snorted over the phone. "You mean this guy you've never seen in your life goes batshit possessively insane over you and you're questioning your right to ask if he's got a little neurochemical imabalance? _No_ , of course not, silly woman. But are you sure you've never met him before? I know you're not a party animal, but maybe you went out in La Push, had a little too much too drink, and…?"

"No," I said firmly. "I have not."

Gabriel snorted a laugh. "Didn't think so. At least that hasn't changed."

"The friends I've made are a little...weird here," I said vaguely, staring out of my bedroom window. Darkness was descending rapidly, leaving a deep, burnt pink scar across the base of the sky. I watched the woods that bordered my house, and said, "I'm worried about telling my dad. He'll react about as badly as you possibly could."

"Christ, can you blame him? What father in his right mind wouldn't go absolutely batshine insane over this? If you were my daughter I'd be putting a bolt on your window in case Mr. Cuckoo decided he wanted to pay you a little night time visit! At the very least, I'd force you to move schools."

I worried my lip. I hadn't considered that. "That didn't actually cross my mind," I admitted. "But now you've said it…"

"Duchess, don't worry about moving schools, OK? It was just a flyaway thought. Your dad's not gonna make you move after you've just settled in, regardless of the sort of company you've managed to keep only two weeks in."

"I haven't done very well for myself, have I? Ugh." I rubbed my forehead, easing the tension that had steadily been building there. "'I've got no clue what I'm going to say to Kim tomorrow when I see her."

"Speaking of Kim, how'd she react to the whole debacle? Did she make any attempt to explain her friend's weird ass behaviour?"

"Nope. I didn't give her a chance to. The ruckus sort of drew everybody in the cafeteria's attention, and surely by now you know - oh, you don't know because I haven't told you." I temporarily ignored the guilt that tried to make a home in my stomach, and rattled off a brief summary about the Kim situation. "Kim is this really, _really_ shy girl who finds it difficult to open up and be herself. After Jared and Jacob dragged Paul away, Kim honestly looked like she was about to have a stroke. I've never seen someone look more like a deer in the headlights in my life. She sort of followed my lead when I dumped my uneaten lunch away, and then I just muttered something about going to the library and made a beeline for it before she could say anything. But really, what could she say to me?"

I could practically hear Gabe shaking his head through the phone. "Duchess, no clue. I do feel sorry for her in a way, you know. She seems way in over her head."

"The emotional side of me is saying that since I met her I've experienced nothing but trouble, but the rational side of me is saying that it's not like she was able to, you know, control Paul's reaction. It's not her fault, obviously, I know that."

"I'm sensing a 'but'..."

"But I just can't help thinking...I just have this niggling feeling that Kim isn't _telling_ me something, you know? I feel like they're _all_ in on some sort of...I don't know!" Huffing in frustration, I glided my knuckles over my forehead, sighing as my fingers eased the pressure that had slowly been building up today. "Garh, I _hate_ gut feelings. They don't make sense."

"Come on, darling. Breathe. Let's do a little emotional deconstruction, shall we? It always helps."

I couldn't suppress my smile. Whenever I was having a bad day Gabriel was always on the other side of it, asking me to unfold my feelings and talk about them to him. For the thousandth time, I humoured him (and maybe myself). "They make me feel weird, Gabey," I said, using his childhood nickname. The affectionate name always seemed to come out of the box when I was feeling particularly vulnerable. "There's something that I feel isn't right. It's not just Kim, it's Paul, too. Before he started acting weirdly, I got the strangest sensation. It felt like I _knew_ him, Gabe, not because I'd met him when I was drunk and at a club, but from somewhere else. Only that's impossible because they've all grown up on the rez. And, He's hardly going to be from the wheatfields of Kansas, is he?"

"That is strange," Gabriel allowed, voice merely a murmur. "Maybe he's just got a familiar sort of face?"

I thought of those eyes, scored so deep, and that dark, sultry gaze. The way they pinned me to the spot and seemed to look inside me. Those cheekbones so sharp they could slice. And that _mouth…_

I shook my head definitively. "Trust me. No one's got a face like his."

I made my way downstairs and peered out of the window located halfway-down. The house bordered a local nature reserve, and now twilight had fallen the pink glow from the sky seemed to touch the black forest with a light finger of mystery. Twilight had always been my favourite time of day; ideally, all my hiking would be done between the hours when the dim blue of the sky turned pink, and then when the dark pink and light blue was squeezed out of the sky entirely in favour of midnight blue. With a sigh, I realised that the whole Paul fiasco likely meant that my father would tighten his protective hold of me, thus decreasing the likelihood of any twilight hikes from now on. Glumly, I shuffled my feet the rest of the way down.

Paul better not ruin La Push for me. A stab of stubbornness kicked in. I reasoned to myself that _no_ , I wouldn't _let_ him. He could try, but he certainly wouldn't succeed.

"Hey, Daddy," I said as I opened a cupboard and grabbed a glass. "You OK? You want a drink? A beer, maybe?"

From where my father was lounging on the couch with his feet up on the ottoman, he shook his head. His face was bathed in the orange light from the tall lamp, and even from this distance I could see the weary lines etched beneath his eyes. "No thanks, sweetie."

"You sure? You look konked out."

My father nodded. After pouring myself a tall glass of water, I went to sit besides him, drawing my feet up and under me on the couch. "Hard day at work?"

Dad shook his head, managing a faint, thoroughly fatigued smile at me. "Not hard. Just tiring. It's always a struggle when you're on your feet all day."

I rubbed my father's arm. "Maybe we should try and fix you up with an acupuncturist? They probably won't be as good as Dave from back home, but it's worth a shot, Daddy. You're going to have your body for the rest of your life so you need to keep it in good condition."

My father chortled. "I will never get used to my daughter and mother being the same person."

I pouted, but I couldn't hold back my laugh when a tired chuckle fell from dad's lips.

"What?" I asked, when he stopped laughing to eye me analytically.

"That's the first time you've called Kansas home," my father said, still watching me. "Everything OK at school, kiddo? Are you happy there?"

 _Are you happy there?_ Sometimes I forgot how perceptive my father was. Sometimes I managed to forget how much of a truly great person he was - not just a great father, but a great person. He tolerated my need for structure and control with an easy smile and an occasional roll of the eyes, but he never forgot what his role was supposed to be in my life, and he never stopped looking out for me and never stopped paying attention to me and my needs.

A lump rose in my throat. I swallowed it down.

Not looking at my father, instead staring at his knees, I whispered, "Something happened at school today."

My father let me speak just as Gabriel had; attentively, without interruptions. When I finished and chanced up a sneaky glance to his face, I winced.

"He _jumped towards_ you?" Dad's eyes were bulging in his head. "Christ above, Frankie!" No longer looking fatigued in the slightest, dad's voice had risen to a shout. "What happened after that? Did you see him again? You better _not_ have seen him again."

I shook my head. "I didn't. I only had a couple of classes afterwards, neither with Kim.

Getting up from the couch with a face like thunder, my dad stormed over to the kitchen side of the joint living-room-kitchen unit. For one alarming moment, I though he was going to phone the school at the definitely unsociable hour of 9:15pm, but I needn't have worried, because my father merely yanked open the fridge door and then began pacing up and down the kitchen with his newly cracked open beer in hand.

"I don't want you worrying one bit about school, you hear me, Francesca?" my father hissed, his normally clear and joyful blue eyes appearing stormy and tumultuous. "I'll sort them out."

Strangely, this did not make me feel an ounce better.

* * *

I walked to school slowly, the only soundtrack to my walking the sound of autumn curling in on the ground underfoot, and the steady _puff puff puff_ of my own breath, which I could see in front of me in wispy curls of smoke.

Today was the first _really_ cold day of La Push that I had experienced and I had come prepared: my thick red-knit scarf was wrapped twice around my neck and mouth, paired with my matching red-knit hat. I was, one could say, rather cosy.

"What are you, some sort of ninja?"

I jumped out of my skin. Holding my and over my frantically pounding heart, I turned around to glare at Jacob Black.

"You snuck up on me," I accused.

Jacob snorted. Despite the weather, he was dressed in a sunset-red t-shirt displaying the silhouette of a forest, and a pair of ratty jeans that I'd noticed him in so often I guessed he probably wore them to bed, too. "I did not," he said, walking besides me. "You were in your own little world."

Shaking my head and pursing my lips because I had most certainly _not_ been in my own little world - rather, I had been soaking up the picturesque if very chilly day - I kept my eyes ahead as Jacob synced his walk up with mine. The normally acerbic Quileute boy's legs ate up the ground like nobody's business, and after a couple of minutes Jacob aimed a rare, easy grin at me. It was simply such a _nice_ smile that I found myself smiling back.

That was until he said, £If you walked any slower, you'd have a shell and leave a trail of slime everywhere you went."

"I walk at a perfectly brisk pace, thank you very much," I huffed, even as I increased my speed from a 'brisk' pace to 'striding to the bus stop when the bus is due _any second'_ pace. "You'll do well to remember I'm only 5'6. You know, actual normal human size."

To my surprise, the easy smile that had lighted his lips vanished, as quick as the flight of a started bird. He looked away.

"Lucky you," he muttered.

For a few moments, we walked awkwardly side by side, the silence that had settled between us definitely not a comfortable one. "My dad," I began self-consciously, trying to warm up the frosty silence that had formed between us, "said that when he was a teenager, all he wanted to be was tall. He comes from a stocky family and grandpa was only 5'6 or so. Growing up all my dad's friends wanted to be rockstars or race car drivers or ballerinas or whatever but my dad said all he wanted to be was tall. At least six feet, he said, but he'd settle for 5'10. Well, he only ended up at 5'8." I managed a laugh. "He was so disappointed."

Glancing up at Jacob's face, I was surprised but pleased to find the ghost of a smile on his lips. Not looking at me, he said, "Tell your dad he's more than welcome to chop off a few inches of me, if he wants. I won't even ask for 'em back."

"He'll be very pleased with that offer." I smiled, content that I'd put the smile back on Jacob's face. "Anyways, why aren't you wearing a jacket? It's freezing?"

Jacob shrugged. "Not cold."

"It is _so_ cold." I uncased my hands from my mittens so I could show Jacob my fingers. "Look at my fingers. They're blue. _Blue_."

" _It is_ cold, but I'm not cold. I told you, I'm hot-blooded."

I made a noise that said I was unimpressed and mittened myself back up.

Then Jacob said, "By the way, I'm sorry about what happened yesterday."

I froze. There it was. He'd mentioned it. He'd brought it up. The topic that I promised myself I would try to steadfastly avoid today.

"Paul must have really freaked you out, huh?" Jacob continued. "He's - he is a good guy deep down." I thought I heard Jacob mutter something like 'way, way deep down', but I couldn't be sure. "He's just got pretty big issues with his temper, and...meeting new people."

For a while, I didn't say anything; instead, I collected my thoughts. "His reaction to me was very bizarre," I admitted. "And scary. Really scary." I swallowed. "What...prompts that sort of reaction? I mean, has he had some sort of traumatic experience-?"

A snort from Jacob cut me off. "No, no, nothing like that. He just doesn't handle meeting new people well."

"But what does that _mean?"_ I asked, frustrated with the way Jacob kept saying 'meeting new people' as though that was a euphemism for something else, as though he'd deliberated upon that phrase and decided that he'd use it in order to conceal what he really wanted to say. "There are plenty of people who don't handle meeting new people so well - people like Kim Conneweller. But she didn't feel the need to go all crazily possessive over me when she met me. Jacob, what _was that about?_ I don't _get it_."

"Paul was planning to talk to you himself later," Jacob said. My heart leaped in my chest, and not in the fluttery, romantic kind of way. More the _he can fuck right off if he thinks I'll allow him within five cubic feet of me_. "He wants to apologise, I think. He-"

"Jacob," I growled. "You and Jared literally had to _drag_ Paul out of the cafeteria. He is not coming anywhere _near_ me again."

"You don't have to be alone with him," Jacob said quickly, "I can stay with you, or Kim can stay with you, or we can all-"

" _No,"_ I bit out. "I don't want him anywhere near me and I don't want anything to do with him. What's going to happen is I'm going to go into school today and pretend he doesn't exist, and if he knows what's good for him he'll pretend that I don't exist, too-"

A loud, air-shattering howl tore through the forest we walked besides. My mouth opened at the sound, forming a silent 'o'. Even to my human ears, the howl seemed filled with pain and fury and upset. Something in my heart tugged, something that spoke to me beyond my normal human vista of perception. I was struck again, for the nth time, by Paul's face when he'd risen from his seat, determined to stop me from leaving. That flint-like determination, the steely glare.

I turned to Jacob. "You heard that, didn't you?" I asked, the previous conversation erased from my mind completely. "I was hiking through the woods a couple days ago and I heard a howl. A wolf's howl. You heard that, right?"

Jacob didn't look at me. His eyes straight ahead, I read tenseness in the sharp line of his jaw, and tight-lippedness around his mouth.

"Jacob?" I asked tentatively, once a few seconds had passed without a word falling from his lips.

Eyes set determinedly ahead, he didn't answer me. Instead, he swung his messenger bag around to the front. I stared as he rifled inside and pulled out a large bag of Doritos.

"I'm hungry," he said plainly, unsealing the pack in one pull. I watched in disgust, and admittedly some fascination, as he somehow managed to slot a full handful - which was saying something, really, because his hands were the size of pint glasses - of chips into his mouth.

I recoiled as a bit of chewed up Dorito hit my forehead.

Wiping my forehead with my mittened hand, I proceeded to shake the (now soiled) glove wildly at the ground. The chewed up glob fell to the ground. "Gross," I grumbled.

Jacob looked at me. "What'd you say?"

I glowered at him. "Nothing."

That day, I was as quick and sneaky as a bullet. Or I liked to think that I was. The couple of classes I did share with Kim I managed to avoid talking to her after class by speed-packing my bag and legging it out the room. At one point, I heard her call out after me, but I figure that where strange, huge men who have a weird fixation over you are concerned, it's better to be safe than worry about being rude. Why couldn't Kim be more like Jacob? As I pushed open the door to the library, I thought, once again, for the nth time, of yesterday's cafeteria scene, shaking my head as feelings of anger began to ebb and flow in my stomach. _Jacob_ had told Paul to simmer down. _Jacob_ had told Paul that he was scaring me.

Kim had done nothing. Just sat there and stared open-mouthed.

Winding through the library aisles, I grinded my teeth in annoyance as I recalled Kim's prone figure. But it wasn't just annoyance that was eating at me. It was complete and utter bewilderment. Kim hadn't just seemed shocked at Paul's behaviour, she had been shocked at...at _me_. At something I did. But why? I hadn't done anything. All I'd done was go up to get some lunch.

Yeah, I thought to myself as my fingers glided across the sci-fi section and picked a book up at random. That seemed to be the root of my anger towards her. Bizarrely, her shock yesterday in the cafeteria seemed to have been directed at _me_ , not _Paul_ , as though I was the one who'd just gone all _you, Jane! Me, Tarzan!_ On her.

Whatever, I thought, settling into a beanbag by the far window. Guess it was just time to properly re-open the friend search. Smiling in satisfaction at this new resolution - I loved resolutions, conclusions and plans; they made me feel in control - I reasoned that I'd go and find Annette later to query my societies match-up. The sooner I found others with the same interests as me, who were even just _marginally_ like me, the better.

A vibration from my pocket drew my attention, and I smiled when I slid out my phone and the screen was lit up with a message from Gabriel. _If he tries it on again, tell him you're a brown belt in jiu-jitsu. Or throw acid on his face. Bet he's not so gung-ho when he's ugly._

And then: _I was kidding about the acid._

And after that: _Tell me how ur day goes anyway. Love u baby g xxxx_

Snorting, I placed my book on my lap so I could reply. _Ty for the words of comfort, Gabey. I'll call u later 3_

 _Excuse me? Where are my kisses, bitch?_

 _I gave you a heart!_

 _...your point?_

Rolling my eyes, I typed out half a dozen kisses and then pressed send. I shook my head when I received a long row of kisses back, but I was smiling.

"You're here."

I froze.

Slowly, the rest of my body preternaturally still, I looked up.

But even before looking, I knew who it would be. Of course I did. How could I forget? That voice was imprinted into my memory. Husky and deep and completely masculine. I don't even know what it was about Paul's voice that made me feel like someone had just set me alight. Jared and Jacob also had voices that were really deep and manly, but _their_ voices didn't make me feel like I needed to splash water on my face. There was something about it, something in Paul's tone that just made me feel completely…

Flustered. Exposed. As if just by talking he had the ability to raise those private things from me that every person has inside, locked tight.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, and my voice came out in a self-conscious whisper.

The sun followed his body as he sat down opposite me, on the floor, settling onto his dark eyes and turning them gold. Gold like the fur of a lion, gold like liquid amber.

Gold, and trained on me.

I watched him cautiously, the way you might eye a restless pacing tiger in a zoo. My heart was pounding a rhythm like running footsteps on a sidewalk. The way it had taken _both_ Jared and Jacob to get him out of that cafeteria, the way he'd basically _apparated_ right in front of me, the way he'd said " _I said stay,"_ to me, as if the thought of me leaving him, or, for that matter, him leaving me, made him _angry_. Furious. Those were the images that were bombarding my mind, and the more my eyes travelled over his body, the tightly corded muscles and the broad, powerful chest and shoulders, those endlessly long legs and plate-sized hands, the more I felt...well, like a cornered deer.

Compared to him, I was so _small_ , and in my place sunk down in the beanbag I felt especially vulnerable. The urge to cover my face with the book rose in me, and I squashed down that impulse the way I squashed down the occasional desire to stay in bed an extra half hour on the weekends - dismissively, and with complete intolerance. I was better than that.

"Why are you here?" I repeated, my voice barely breaking the air, staring exactly in the middle of his chest.

"You gonna look at me anytime soon, or…?"

Feeling my face turn red, I chanced up a glance at his eyes. As I suspected, they were completely focused on me - but not in a flattering way. The way I imagined a bear would stalk the little fawn before going in for the kill. "There," I muttered, my finger moving over the spine of the (as of yet) unread book I held between trembling hands. "Now, are you going to answer my question, or…?"

A snicker earned him another glance from me. "Don't mind me. I just came to do a little reading." He waved a book in the air that I only just noticed he was carrying.

I raised my eyebrows. " _Emma_ by Jane Austen?"

Shrugging easily, but never moving his eyes from mine, he said, "It was the first thing on the returned items shelf, and I needed an excuse to come over here."

My breath caught. I held still as his eyes scanned over my face, as though he was keeping stock of something, as though I'd gone away for weeks and he was trying to absorb each little feature into his memory, as though no single look could give him what he wanted.

I didn't think I'd ever felt so naked.

"Not really an excuse if you're going to tell me, though, is it?" I countered, trying to sound light and breezy, and failing horribly.

"Guess I blew my cover." He sounded unapologetic and unphased.

We stared at each other. Self-consciously, I cradled the book to my stomach, feeling like I needed _some_ thing between us, something to come between that frighteningly short space between us.

"I wanted to say sorry," Paul murmured. "That's why I came here."

I inhaled sharply. "Sorry for what?"

He rolled his eyes. "Don't play dumb. You know what-"

"Say it," I said tightly. "If you've come to apologise, you may as well tell me what you're apologising for. So we're clear."

Like a tornado clearing the happiness from the sky, the darkness that overcame his eyes in that moment was rapid and sudden and dangerous. "You're going to make this hard?"

I balked at that. " _Excuse me? I'm_ trying to make things hard? You were the one who nearly attacked me!"

His eyes bulged. He looked at me incredulously.

And then his features settled into a snarl.

More than a little perturbed, I noticed he was shaking.

"I was not - I would never - _never_ hurt you," he growled, leaning forward so that we were mere inches apart. Catching my breath, I tried to shuffle backwards, using my hands on the ground as propellers, but all that happened was the beanbag sank me in further and Paul felt the need to inch further towards me. " _Never._ How could you even _say_ that?"

Now it was my turn to look incredulous. "How can _you_ say that after what happened yesterday? You - you _jumped towards_ me!"

"Because you were trying to leave!" he barked, voice rising, hands upgrading from 'trembling' to 'out and out shaking'. His eyes went black. "I said _stay_ and you _left_."

Is this really happening? I mused, shaking my head. Is this really, really happening?

As I took in Paul's seething figure - the smooth dark of his skin, the close-croppedness of his hair, and his sheer _enormity_ \- I had to concede that yes, this really was happening.

"So much for an apology," I bit out, rising to my feet. Flinging my barely read book onto the used books barrow (because hey, yes, I was angry, but I was still a responsible user of school resources), I turned back around to meet the eyes of the rather temperamental male who was now also stood up and towering way, way above me. "I don't know what your objective was, coming here. You know, when you told me you were going to apologise I was ready to excuse your alarming behaviour yesterday, but it's clear that nothing has changed, and you're still the same maniac from yesterday."

Quite a biting retort, I thought to myself proudly, as I sidestepped Lahote in an effort to walk past him.

I didn't succeed.

Catching my arm, he fastened onto my wrist with a grip like hot steel and pulled me towards him, easily, effortlessly. Right into his arms.

* * *

Hey, my loves! All reviews (of the positive AND negative kind!) are very much welcomed, encouraged, and met with my profuse and eternal thanks. Much love xxx


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